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The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson
The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson Author:Robert Louis Stevenson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to the nature of which he gave no clue whatever, ot appeal for sympathy in circumstances impossible to conjecture; or, starting in a key of vague poetry and sent... more »iment, would wind up (in a manner characteristic also of his talk) with a rhapsody of hyperbolical slang. Or he would dilate on some new phase of his many maladies with burlesque humor,—with complaint never; but what had been the nature of the attack you were left to wonder and guess in vain. During the period of his Odyssey in the South Seas, from August, i888, until the spring of i890, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the scenes he visited inevitably interrupted all correspondence for months together; and when at long intervals a packet reached us, the facts and circumstances of his wanderings were to be gathered from the admirable letters of Mrs. Stevenson (who has this feminine accomplishment in perfection) rather than from his own. But when, later in the last-mentioned year, I890, he and his family were settled on their newly bought property on the mountain behind Apia, to which he gave the name of Vailima (five rivers), he for the first time, to my infinite gratification, took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his death. It is these journal-letters from Samoa, covering with a few intervals the period from November, i890, to October, i894, that are printed by themselves in the present volume. They occupy a place, as has been indicated, quite apart in his correspondence, and in any general selection from his letters would fill quite a disproportionate space. Begun without a thought of publicity, and simply to maintain our intimacy undimin- ished, so far as might be, by separation, they assumed in...« less