She told me stories of her first arrival in New York that were as amusing as some of Stevenson's prairie experiences. She engaged a messenger-boy to pioneer her through the great stone jungle, not from fear of pickpockets or the like, but to save her from a helplessly lost feeling she always had when alone on the streets of a strange city. On arriving, she went directly to the old St. Stephen's Hotel on University Place and Eleventh Street, registering thus:
"Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (wife of the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)."
To those of the friends who smiled over it, she explained that, being ill at the time, she had a horror of dying unknown in a hotel room and being sent to the morgue.
I replied to this by telling her how my mother, being alone at a large London hotel for a night, insisted on having one of the chambermaids sleep with her, no doubt from the same sense of hopeless wandering in a similar Dædalian Labyrinth.
Years after, some autograph collector hunted up that old St. Stephen's register and cut the name from the page, which reminded me of a little story I once told Mrs. Low.
As a boy Mr. Eaton one day mounted the pulpit of the church in the little village of Phillipsburg, P. Q., Canada, where he was born, and made a drawing on one of the fly-leaves of the Bible. When it was later told in the village that he had exhibited at the Paris Salon, someone cut the leaf from the Book of Books.
When one starts story telling to a good listener, little incidents dart through the brain that for long have lain dormant, and to pass the time, I told Mrs. Stevenson that on the day Mr. Eaton finished his portrait of President Garfield for the Union League Club, he asked the newly landed Celtic maid if she would wash his brushes for him (an office that he generally performed for himself), to which she exclaimed joyfully, "To think that I have lived to see the day that I washed the brushes that painted the President of the United States!"
What the artist regarded as an added chore to her already full labors, was to her willing hands a pride and an honor. It may be a truism that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but there certainly seems to be a good deal in a view-point. In looking back, I know that I grasped, that day, something of what the later years proved her to the world, for I read her then, as a highly gifted woman who had submerged her own personality in the greater gifts and personal claims of her invalid husband and in a recent reading of her Samoan notes there was imparted to me, by means too subtle to explain, those glimpses that insight bestows, that are called reading between the lines—a realization of the hardship of much of her life in the South Seas. I felt distinctly the under-current of troubled restlessness beneath the apparent good time of an unusual environment.
Wyatt Eaton as a Student