strange country can not argue—they can only submit.

The landlord looked over the new arrival from behind the bar, and then through a little window called for his wife to come in from the kitchen. The appearance of the dripping emigrant who insisted in answer to their questions that he was not sick, and that he needed nothing, made an appeal to the mother-heart of this wife of an Irish saloonkeeper.

Straightway she got dry clothes from her husband's wardrobe for the poor man, and insisted that he should at once go to his room and change the wet garments for the dry ones. She then prepared him supper which he ate in the kitchen, and choked for gratitude when this middle-aged, stout and illiterate woman poured his tea and called him "dear heart."

She asked him where he was going and what he was going to do. He dare not repeat the story that he was a stone-mason—the woman knew he was some sort of a superior being, and his answer that he was going out West to make his fortune was met by the Irish-like response, "And may the Holy Mother grant that ye find it."

It is very curious how gentle and beautiful souls find other gentle and beautiful souls even in barrooms, and among the lowly—I really do not understand it! In his book Robert Louis paid the landlord of Number Ten West Street such a heartfelt compliment that the traditions still invest the place, and the present landlord is not forgetful that his predecessor once entertained an angel unawares.

When the literary pilgrim enters the door, scrapes his feet on the sanded floor, and says "Robert Louis Stevenson," the barkeeper and loafers straighten up and endeavor to put on the pose and manner of gentlemen and all the courtesy, kindness and consideration they can muster are yours. The man who could redeem a West Street barkeeper and glorify a dock saloon must indeed have been a most remarkable personality.

FANNY OSBOURNE

To get properly keelhauled for his overland emigrant trip across the continent, Robert Louis remained in New York three days. The kind landlady packed a big basket of food—not exactly the kind to tempt the appetite of an invalid, but all flavored with good-will, and she also at the last moment presented him a pillow in a new calico pillowcase that has been accurately described, and the journey began.

There was no sleeping-car for the author of "A Lodging for the Night." He sat bolt upright and held tired babies on his knees, or tumbled into a seat and wooed the drowsy god. The third night out he tried sleeping flat in the aisle of the car on the floor until the brakeman ordered him up, and then two men proposed to fight the officious brakeman if he did not leave the man alone. To save a riot Robert Louis agreed to obey the rules. It was a ten-day trip across the continent, filled with discomforts that would have tried the constitution of a strong man.

Robert Louis arrived "bilgy," as he expressed it, but alive. Mrs. Osbourne was better. The day she received the telegram was the turning-point in her case.

The doctor perceived that his treatment was along the right line, and ordered the medicine continued.

She was too ill to see Robert Louis—it was not necessary, anyway. He was near and this was enough. She began to gain. Just here seems a good place to say that the foolish story to the effect that Mr. Osbourne was present at the wedding and gave his wife away has no foundation in fact. Robert Louis never saw Mr. Osbourne and never once mentioned his name to any one so far as we know. He was a mine-prospector and speculator, fairly successful in his work. That he and his wife were totally different in their tastes and ambitions is well understood. They whom God has put asunder no man can join together.

The husband and wife had separated, and Mrs. Osbourne went to France to educate her children—educate them as far from their father as possible. Also, she wished to study art on her own account. So, blessed be stupidity—and heart-hunger and haunting misery that drive one out and away.

She returned to California to obtain legal freedom and make secure her business affairs. There are usually three parties to a divorce, and this case was no exception. It is a terrible ordeal for a woman to face a divorce-court and ask the State to grant her a legal separation from the father of her children. Divorce is not a sudden, spontaneous affair—it is the culmination of a long train of unutterable woe. Under the storm and stress of her troubles Mrs. Osbourne had been stricken with fever. Sickness is a result, and so is health.

When Robert Louis arrived in San Francisco Mrs. Osbourne grew better. In a few months she pushed her divorce case to a successful conclusion.

Mr. Osbourne must have been a man with some gentlemanly instincts, for he made no defense, provided a liberal little fortune for his former family, and kindly disappeared from view.

Robert Louis did desultory work on newspapers in San Francisco and later at Monterey, with health up and down as hope fluctuated. In the interval a cablegram had come from his father saying, "Your allowance is two hundred and fifty pounds a year." This meant that he had been forgiven, although not very graciously, and was not to starve.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were married May Tenth, Eighteen Hundred Eighty. "The Silverado Squatters" shows how to spend a honeymoon in a miner's deserted cabin, a thousand miles from nowhere. The Osbourne children were almost grown, and were at that censorious age when the average youngster feels himself capable of taking mental and moral charge of his parents.

But these children were different; then, they had a different mother, and as for Robert Louis, he certainly was a different proposition from that ever evolved from creation's matrix. He belongs to no class, evades the label, and fits into no pigeonhole.

The children never called him "father": he was always "Louis"—simply one of them. He married the family and they married him. He had captured their hearts in France by his story-telling, his flute-playing and his skilful talent with the jackknife. Now he was with them for all time, and he was theirs. It was the most natural thing in the world.

Mrs. Stevenson was the exact opposite of her husband in most things. She was quick, practical, accurate, and had a manual dexterity in a housekeeping way beyond the lot of most women. With all his half-invalid, languid, dilettante ways, Robert Louis adored the man or woman who could do things. Perhaps this was why his heart went out to those who go down to the sea in ships, the folk whose work is founded not on theories, but on absolute mathematical laws.

In their fourteen years of married life, Robert Louis never tired of watching Fanny at her housekeeping. "To see her turn the flapjacks by a simple twist of the wrist is a delight not soon to be forgotten, and my joy is to see her hanging clothes on the line in a high wind."

The folks at home labored under the hallucination that Robert Louis had married "a native Californian," and to them a "native" meant a half-breed Indian. The fact was that Fanny was born in Indiana, but this explanation only deepened the suspicion, for surely people who lived in Indiana are Indians—any one would know that! Cousin Robert made apologies and explanations, although none was needed, and placed himself under the ban of suspicion of being in league to protect Robert Louis, for the fact that the boys had always