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The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends (2); 1880-1887: Alps and Highlands, Hyères, Bournemouth
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends 1880-1887 Alps and Highlands Hyres Bournemouth - 2 Author:Robert Louis Stevenson Volume: 2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1901 Original Publisher: Methuen Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you ... more »can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: IX THE UNITED STATES AGAIN: WINTER IN THE ADIRONDACKS AUGUST 1887 -- OCTOBER 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 towards 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 haemorrhage 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 gaiety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his wife 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 SS. Ludgate Hill, sailing for New York from London on August 21st, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to...« less