l psychology. A
case that now appealed to him with especial force was that of the cruel
persecution kept up against the widow and daughters of the murdered man
Curtin. He determined that if no one else would take up the duty of
resisting such persecution without regard to consequences, he would take
it up himself, in the hope of more effectually rousing the public
conscience to the evils of the time. His plan was to go with his family,
occupy and live upon the derelict farm, and let happen what would. This,
as the letters referring to the matter plainly show, was no
irresponsible dream or whim, but a purpose conceived in absolute and
sober earnest. His wife and household were prepared to follow, though
under protest, had he persisted; as it seemed for some weeks that he
certainly would, until at last the arguments of his friends, and still
more the unmistakable evidence that his father's end was near,
persuaded him to give up his purpose. But to the last, I think he was
never well satisfied that in giving way he had not been a coward,
preferring fireside ease and comfort to the call of a public duty.

After spending a part of the winter at Bournemouth and a part at
Torquay, both Stevenson's parents returned to Edinburgh in April 1887;
and within a few weeks after their arrival he was summoned north to his
father's death-bed. He stayed at Edinburgh the short time necessary for
the dispatch of business, and returned to his own sick-room life at
Skerryvore.

During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at
Bournemouth, preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no
apparent progress towards recovery. Every period of respite had been
quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as
it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost
any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring
struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion,
which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew
in the long run merely irksome; and even his persistent high courage and
gaiety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his wife and
many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him.
Accordingly, when in May 1887 the death of his father severed the
strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very
ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in
thinkin