s Elizabeth
of England. She was therefore both physically and mentally the very
antithesis of the gay, hilarious, open-minded and open-hearted
Stevenson, and for that very reason perhaps the woman in all the world
best fitted to be his life comrade and helpmate. At any rate we may
well ask ourselves if anywhere else he would have found the kind of
understanding and devotion which she gave him from the day of their
first meeting at Grez until the day of his death in far-away Samoa; if
anywhere else there was a woman of equal attainments who would
willingly, nay gladly, throw aside all of the pleasures and comforts
of civilization to live among savages, and the still rougher whites of
the South Pacific, in order that her husband might have just a little
more oxygen for his failing lungs, a little more _chance_ for a
respite and an extension of his shortening years? Probably no one ever
better deserved than she the noble tribute of verse which her husband
gave her, and from which I have quoted the opening line."

In 1878 the Osbournes returned to America, travelling by way of
Queenstown, where, for the sake of stepping on Irish soil, they went
ashore for a few hours and took a ride in a real jaunting-car, with a
driver who was as Irish as possible, with a thick brogue, a hole in
his hat, and a smiling, good-humoured countenance.

A short stop was made in Indiana to visit the old family home in
Hendricks County, now saddened by the death of our father, and then
Fanny Osbourne once more turned her steps towards the setting sun. At
this time she added me, her youngest sister, to her party, and I
remained with her until her marriage to Stevenson and their departure
for Scotland. She was then in the full flower of her striking and
unusual beauty, and so youthful in appearance that she, her daughter,
and I passed everywhere as three sisters. To me, reared as I had been
in the flat country of central Indiana, where mountains and the sea
were wonders known only through books, the journey across the
continent--with its glimpses of the mighty snow-capped crags of the
Rockies outlined against the fiery sunset skies of that region, the
weird castellated rocks of the "Bad Lands," the colonies of funny
little prairie-dogs peeping out of their burrows, the blanket-wrapped
Indians waiting at the stations, and finally the awesome vision of the
stupendous canyons and precipices of the Sierras, was like some
strange, impossible dream; and