A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free,
The august Father
Gave to me.'
At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.'
Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on friendships, interested in classes, and even then there was something of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when the junior received that delightful dedication of Treasure Island in which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the tale appeals.
Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described in Silvarado Squatters, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887 finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp in far Samoa.
The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson. Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in 1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing. Mr Colvin was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him were written The Vailima Letters.
His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in these days is better than any picture:
'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,