A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

Cover art

Robert Louis Stevenson
Painting by W. Hatherell.
Took down the folds of her hair—shook it round her face and the pool repeated her thus veiled.
Prince Otto.

BY MAURICE CLARE
LONDON HODDER & STOUGHTON 1910
In the same Series. Dickens. Thackeray.

Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been permitted to enter its doors—you might account yourself a somewhat favoured person. For the master of the house, that rickety and cloistered spectre, as he termed himself, the pallid brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, might be invisible for the nonce—shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing hemorrhage. Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest you left contagion of that cold.