title="p. x" id="pgepubid00008"/>said my husband, ‘unless I see it with my own eyes; for it is too damnable for belief!’

But see it he did, in spite of his incredulity, for in Sydney, a month or two later, the very journal containing the letter condemnatory of Father Damien was among the first we chanced to open.  I shall never forget my husband’s ferocity of indignation, his leaping stride as he paced the room holding the offending paper at arm’s-length before his eyes that burned and sparkled with a peculiar flashing light.  His cousin Mr. Balfour, in his Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, says: ‘his eyes . . . when he was moved to anger or any fierce emotion seemed literally to blaze and glow with a burning light.’  In another moment he disappeared through the doorway, and I could hear him, in his own room, pulling his chair to the table, and the sound of his inkstand being dragged towards him.

That afternoon he called us together—my son, my daughter, and myself—saying that he had something serious to lay before us.  He went over the circumstances succinctly, and then we three had the incomparable experience of hearing its author read aloud the defence of Father Damien while it was still red-hot from his indignant soul.

As we sat, dazed and overcome by emotion, he pointed out to us that the subject-matter was libellous in the highest degree, and the publication of the

article might cause the loss of his entire substance.  Without our concurrence he would not take such a risk.  There was no dissenting voice; how could there be?  The paper was published with almost no change or revision, though afterwards my husband said he considered this a mistake.  He thought he should have waited for his anger to cool, when he might have been more impersonal and less egotistic.

The next day he consulted an eminent lawyer, more from curiosity than from any other reason.  Mr. Moses—I think that was his name—was at first inclined to be jocular.  I remember his smiling question: ‘Have you called him a hell-hound or an atheist?  Otherwise there is no libel.’  But when he looked over the manuscript his countenance changed.  ‘This is a serious affair,’ he said; ‘however, no one will publish it for you.’  In that Mr. Moses was right; no one dared publish the pamphlet.  But that difficulty was soon overcome.  My husband hired a printer by the day, and the work was rushed through.  We then, my daughter, my son, and myself, were set to work helping address the pamphlets, which were scattered far and wide.

Father Damien was vindicated by a stranger, a man of another country and another religion from his own.

F. V. de G. S.

Contents:

   Preface by Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson
   Lay Morals
   Father Damien
   The Pentland Rising
      I.  The Causes of the Revolt
      II.  The Beginning
      III.  The March of the Rebels
      IV.  Rullion Green
      V.  A Record of Blood
   The Day After To-morrow
   College Papers
      I.  Edinburgh Students in 1824
      II.  The Modern Student
      III.  Debating Societies
   Criticisms
      I.  Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Song”
      II.  Salvini’s Macbeth
      III.  Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”
   Sketches
      I.  The Satirist
      II.  Nuits Blanches
      III.  The Wreath of Immortelles
      IV.  Nurses
      V.  A Character
 

The Great North Road
      I.  Nance at the “Green Dragon”
      II.  In which Mr. Archer is Installed
      III.  Jonathan Holdaway
      IV.  Mingling Threads
      V.  Life in the Castle
      IV.  The Bad Half-Crown
      VII.  The Bleaching-Green
      VIII.  The Mail Guard
   The Young Chevalier
      Prologue: The Wine-Seller’s Wife
      I.  The Prince
   Heathercat
      I.  Traqairs of Montroymont
      II.  Francie
      III.  The Hill-End of Drumlowe

LAY MORALS

The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at Edinburgh in the spring of 1879.  They are unrevised, and must not be taken as representing, either as to matter or form, their author’s final thoughts; but they contain much that is essentially characteristic of his mind.

Copyright in the United States of America.

CHAPTER I

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.  Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive.  Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative.  The speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.  Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints.  No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young, must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already retailed to them in their own youth.  Every generation has to educate another which it has brought upon the stage.  People who readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due.  What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions?  Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own defence.  Where does he find them? and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause.  Besides these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walk through a quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.  It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive it.  As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil, it is not the doctrine of Christ.  What he taught (and in this he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views, but a view.  What he showed us was an attitude of