St Ives is a bright story of adventure which Mr Stevenson had almost completed, and which Mr Quiller Couch was enabled very skilfully to finish with the assistance of the author's step-daughter, Mrs Strong, who had, besides being its amanuensis, helped Mr Stevenson with this story and been much in his confidence regarding it. It appeared first in The Windsor Magazine where it was received with favour. It is the history of a French prisoner in Edinburgh Castle during the wars of the great Napoleon. He makes, like the other prisoners, little carved ornaments for sale, and Flora, the heroine, has so touched him while buying these that he falls in love with her and presents her with a carved lion. She returns his sentiment of admiration, and after his escape she and her brother, a natural gentlemanly lad, hide Mr St Ives in the henhouse at Swanston Cottage where they live with a stern old aunt. The aunt is a well-drawn type of old-fashioned Scotchwoman, infinitely more natural and more interesting than the niece. In Edinburgh and round Mr Stevenson's own country home Swanston, the interest at first largely centres, and the writer gives a very graphic description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses,
'Marvellous places though handy to home.'
One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures, Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the hand of Flora.
Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas! all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr Stevenson's work is Weir of Hermiston. In the few perfectly finished chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima desolate.
The beautiful Edinburgh Edition of Mr Stevenson's works—which his friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press—is almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It contains St Ives, and practically completes the edition; but Mr Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this Edinburgh Edition a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,' written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was busily and cheerily employed.