104 Six Nineteenth-Century Fictionists
land’s is not the climate for diseased lungs, and it was now
manifest that Stevenson was chronically ill of tuberculosis.
For eight years his life, as his biographer says, “seemed to
hang by a thread.” But his courage never failed. He trav-
eled from health resort to health resort on the Continent,
back to Scotland and to England in the intervals, writing,
writing all the time, and gladdening with his radiant spirit
those with whom he came in contact.
Doubtless the death of his father, whom Stevenson loved
and honored with even more than usual filial affection,
made it comparatively easy for him to take his mother and
his wife finally away from Scotland; for, though he was a
loyal Scotsman, he never relished the Scottish climate. So
he started for Colorado, but, on landing in New York, was
persuaded to go instead to the Adirondacks, where he spent
a winter at Saranac, very busy with some fiction that has
become famous,--“The Master of Ballantrae,’’—and with
some no less famous essays written under contract for
“Scribner’s Magazine,” including “The Christmas Ser-
mon,” an essay which is likely to be read as long as people
read English. In June, 1888, Stevenson, being thirty-eight
years of age, embarked on a yachting tour of the South Seas
with his family, S. S. McClure having provided funds, in
return for which Stevenson was to write letters of travel for
the McClure Company.
There were some two years of travel in the Pacific seas,
visits to Hawaii and the leper settlement at Molokai, which
gave rise to that scathing piece of righteous indignation, the
letter in defense of Father Damien, who had given his life
to the lepers and whose character had been aspersed by one
who should have known better. There were visits to other
and remoter islands, adventures amusing and thrilling, and
finally in 1890 Stevenson settled down for four years—his