He has a long, narrow face, and wears his long brown hair parted in the middle and combed back. It is just such straight, coarse hair as General Roger A. Pryor’s, but much lighter in color. Stevenson sat in a forward corner of the car, with his hat off, and the cape of his coat up behind his head like a monk’s cowl. His black velvet coat and vest showed plainly, and over his legs he wore a black and white checked shawl. His Byronic collar was soft and untidy, and his shirt was unlaundered, but his clothes were scrupulously clean. On the long, thin, white fingers of his left hand he wore two rings, and he kept these fingers busy constantly pulling his drooping moustache. His face is slightly freckled and a little hollow at the cheek, but it has a good bit of Scotch color in it.
Mr. Stevenson presented such an odd figure that all in the car stared at him, particularly when a rumor of who he was ran among the people. But he seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused. He was reading a book, and every now and then he would fix a sentence in his mind, close the book on one finger, look at the ceiling and muse. When a sentence pleased him, he smiled at it, and then read it again. At the Jersey City depot he threw off his shawl and stood up, and then the figure he cut was extraordinary, for his coat proved to be merely a large cape, with a small one above it, and under both came his extra long legs, or, rather, his long lavender trousers, for they appeared to have no legs within them.
Mrs. Stevenson was with him, but sat apart studying the scenery. Her husband looked at her frequently with a whimsical smile, and found great fun in laughing at her behind his book when a dude of tremendous style took the seat beside her.—The Sun, 1887.
APPRECIATION AND HOMAGE.
“The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its forerunner, ‘Tom Sawyer.’”
....“He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to ‘Silverado Squatters’.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic ... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs.”
Brander Matthews.
“No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is most unceasingly inspired by ‘an unextinguishable zest in technical successes’ and has also most constantly remembered that ‘The end of all art is to please.’”
M. G. Van Rensselaer.