The house in which they lived, a white frame cottage with green shutters and a veranda around it, belonged to a guide named Andrew Baker, who took parties into the woods for hunting and fishing excursions. Baker was a typical frontiersman—brave, obstinate, independent, and fearless—who might have stepped out of Leather Stocking, and he had a kind, sweet wife. The cottage stood on high ground, so that its occupants could look down on the river, and the view, except for the brilliant hues of the frost-tinted leaves, was enough like the Highlands to make Louis and his mother feel quite at home.
Life in the cottage was frontier-like in its simplicity, and the Scotch lady, for whom this was the first experience in "roughing it," asked for many things that caused great surprise to the village storekeeper, including such unheard-of luxuries as coffee-pots, teapots, and egg-cups. Writing to her friend Miss Boodle, the "gamekeeper" of Skerryvore, Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson describes their life at Saranac:
"We are high up in the Adirondack Mountains, living in a guide's cottage in the most primitive fashion. The maid does the cooking (we have little beyond venison and bread to cook) and the boy comes every morning to carry water from a distant spring for drinking purposes. It is already very cold, but we have calked the doors and windows as one calks a boat, and have laid in a store of extraordinary garments made by the Canadian Indians. I went to Montreal to buy these and came back laden with buffalo skins, snow shoes, and fur caps. Louis wants to have his photograph taken in his, hoping to pass for a mighty hunter or sly trapper. He is now more like the hardy mountaineer, taking long walks on hill-tops in all seasons and weathers. It is something like Davos here, all the invalids looking stronger and ruddier than we who are supposed to be in good health.... Every afternoon a vehicle called a 'buckboard' is brought to our door, sometimes with one large horse attached, and sometimes we have a pair of lovely spirited ponies. The buckboard is so light that when we meet a stage-coach on the narrow road we simply drive our horse up the hillside and lift the buckboard out of the way. Very soon, however, we shall exchange it for a sleigh."
It was a long, bitter winter spent amid the ice and snow, the thermometer at one time showing 48 degrees below zero. By November 19 it was fiercely cold, and water and ink froze in the rooms with fires going all day and night. When the kitchen floor was washed with warm water, even with a hot fire burning in the room, the floor became a sheet of ice. All food had to be thawed out before it could be eaten, and the thawing-out process sometimes presented great difficulties, a haunch of venison remaining full of ice after being in a hot oven for an hour. Sometimes a lump of ice was left unmelted in the centre of the soup-pot even when the water boiled all around it. The cold was most intense at night, when the rivets could be heard starting from the boards like pistol-shots, but during the day the temperature was often quite mild. The snow was so deep that it reached the second-story windows, and paths had to be shovelled out and kept clear around the house. In the streets a snow-plough was used. By March the Hunter's Home was nearly buried in the drifts, and in spite of a huge open fireplace, in which great log fires were kept constantly burning, and a stove in every room, it was impossible to do much more than barely keep from freezing to death. When they went out, muffled up to the ears in furs, they carried little slabs of hot soapstone in their pockets, for it was a great comfort to thrust a frozen hand into a toasting-hot pocket.
Added to the bitterness of the cold was the depression of grey, sunless days, only too like their memories of Scotland, and while they sat and shivered around their immense fireplace their thoughts turned insistently towards sunnier lands. Many years before, when Mr. Stevenson was a mere lad, it had been suggested that the South Seas was the very place for him, and the plan for a voyage there some time in the future had always lain dormant in his thoughts, waiting for the opportunity. This old dream now came to mind again, and every glance from their frost-covered windows at the bleak dreariness without made their vision of tropical forests and coral strands seem the more alluring. The project now began to take on definite shape, and days were spent in poring over Findlay's directories of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the South Seas.
In the meantime much work was accomplished, the most important being a series of twelve articles written by Mr. Stevenson for Scribner's Magazine, including some of his best-known essays—The Lantern Bearers, A Chapter on Dreams, etc. In the short hours of daylight and the long, dark evenings he worked with his stepson on the novel called The Wrong Box. It was here, too, that the story of the two brothers, The Master of Ballantrae, was thought out, and The Black Arrow, a book which failed to meet with Mrs. Stevenson's approval, was revised. In the dedication to this last he says:
"No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your imprimatur; a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to peruse The Black Arrow; I think I should lack humor indeed if I let the occasion slip and did not place your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read—and never will read."
By the time spring had melted the deep snow around their mountain home they had come to the definite decision to undertake the cruise in the event that a suitable vessel could be secured for the purpose. Leaving the other members of the family about to start for Manasquan in New Jersey, Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson went to San Francisco, where she found and chartered the yacht Casco, belonging to Doctor Merritt of Oakland, for a six months' cruise.
While in California she came to visit me at Monterey, where years before we had all been so happy together. During the week she spent there we did the things that she liked best—spending long delightful days gathering shells on the beach at Point Cypress, where the great seas roared in from across the wide Pacific and broke thunderously at our feet. When noon came, bringing us appetites sharpened by the sparkling air, we built a fire under the old twisted trees and barbecued the meat we had brought with us. She seemed to be welling over with happiness—partly because of her great pride and joy in her husband's success, and partly because, after years spent in Alpine snows, Scotch mists, London fogs, and fierce Adirondack cold, she had come again into the sunlight of her beloved California.
While there she had a pleasant meeting with Louis's old friend Jules Simoneau, of which she writes to her husband: