stless and helpless half the day, with no
companion but his own thoughts and fancies (not always so pleasant
either, if, like Frankenstein's monster, or, better still like the imp in
the bottle in the _Arabian Nights_, you cannot, once for all liberate
them, and set them adrift on their own charges to visit other people), he
made a home in the sweeter air and more steady climate of the South
Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he could safely and
beneficially be as active as he would be involuntarily idle at home, or
work only under pressure of hampering conditions. That was surely an
illustration of the true "laying-to" with an unaffectedly brave, bright
resolution in it.

CHAPTER VI--SOME EARLIER LETTERS

Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar
letters were the best medium to reveal a man. The letters must have been
written with no idea of being used for this end, however--free, artless,
the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart. Now, these letters of
R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in
this way--they reveal the man--reveal him in his strength and his
weakness--his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with
whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to
his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them. When he was
ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this
account of his daily routine:

"Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender
gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it,
maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an
active step. The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to
Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He
descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of
the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . . He seats himself
at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch
extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before
him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the
deity, very good. A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the
supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to
exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this
rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence