One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches patronise he wrote The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue, which was given to me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which, rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.
Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in 1885 was The Child's Garden of Verses, and anything more dainty than the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an imaginative child.
Ballads, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahéro, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north. With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends, Ticonderoga and Heather Ale. The first gives in easily flowing lines a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in battle there.
The Heather Ale is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.
Christmas at Sea is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on board the labouring ship—that stormy Christmas Day—that she has at last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the lighted home behind the coastguard's house,
'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...
... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way
To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blesséd Christmas Day ...
... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,