As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.
But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'
Underwoods was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written at different times and in different places, and while many of them are full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.
Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very charming lines are to his father.
Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone hill-top where he lies.
Book II. of Underwoods is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise.
'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and again—
'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'
And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words.