THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Edited by Sidney Colvin
SARANAC LAKE:—WINTER, 1887-1888
During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no apparent progress toward recovery. Every period of respite had been quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion, which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew in the long run merely irksome, and even his persistent high courage and gayety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his family and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him. Accordingly when in May, 1887, the death of his father severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life. His wife's connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure of lung patients. Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly took passage on board the steamship Ludgate Hill, sailing for New York from London on August 17, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine.
It was the moment when his reputation had first reached its height in the United States, owing especially to the immense impression made by the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He experienced consequently—for the first time—the pleasures, such as they were, of celebrity, and also its inconveniences; found the most hospitable of refuges in the house of his kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild, of Newport; and quickly made many other friends, including the owner and the editor of this Magazine, from whom he immediately received and accepted very advantageous offers of work. Having been dissuaded from braving, for the present, the fatigue of the long journey to Colorado and the extreme rigors of its winter climate, he determined to try instead a season at the mountain station of Saranac Lake, in the Adirondack Mountains, New York State, which had lately been coming into reputation as a place of cure. There, under the care of the well-known resident physician, Dr. Trudeau, he spent nearly seven months, from the end of September, 1887, to the end of April, 1888, with results on the whole favorable to his own health, though not to that of his wife, who at these high altitudes was never well. His work during the winter consisted of the twelve papers published in the course of 1888 in Scribner's Magazine, including, perhaps, the most striking of all his essays, A Chapter on Dreams, Pulvis et Umbra, Beggars, The Lantern Bearers, Random Memories, etc.; as well as the greater part of the Master of Ballantrae and The Wrong Box—the last originally conceived and drafted by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne—and the ballad of Ticonderoga.
Lloyd Osbourne. Mrs. Stevenson. R. L. Stevenson.
On the Porch of the Cottage at Saranac, in the Adirondacks, U. S. A.
(From a Photograph.)
The following letters are extracted from those which tell of his voyage to New York and his reception there at this date, and of his winter's life and work at Saranac:
Newport, R. I., U. S. A. [September, 1887].