Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, The Silvarado Squatters, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner's house—if one can by courtesy call a house the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!—on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.
Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience than 'roughing it' in that sheltered cañon on the mountain side with the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.
Silvarado Squatters, like The Vailima Letters, shows to perfection how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells of home.
'From the dim sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a world of seas,
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'
he quotes and adds—
'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]