In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter, and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic, indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.
Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage, and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic in one so handicapped by adverse fate.
When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum of his work, the length of his years—comparatively short as these were—witness to the truth that will can do many things. He willed to fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household, made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by the same sunny temperament.
In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid in 1875, and it was often repeated.
His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every point of view he took his passage in an emigrant ship—where he tells us he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!—and at New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant train.
In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays entitled Across the Plains, and in The Amateur Emigrant, he describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined upbringing and frail constitution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-passengers, the character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous journey of which Joaquin Miller says:—
'We glide through golden seas of grain,
We shoot, a shining comet, through
The mountain range, against the blue,
And then, below the walls of snow,