stence.

In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the
freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those
he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes--

'I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'

After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final
summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when
in the last words of the book he says--

'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand
The night at Thy command
Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals
so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume
of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he
quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W.
Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in
the original--

'From the lone sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.'

In _Tait's Magazine_ for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from
the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,'
the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789,
and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the
author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean
crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses--the first
four lines, and chorus, of which are--

'Listen to me as when we heard our father
Sing long ago the song of other shores;
Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
All your deep voices as ye pull your oars.
_Chorus_--Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand,
But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'

Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the
Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and
is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known
and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.

CHAPTER X

HIS STORIES

'... Thy