34 Sir Sidney Golvin [Feb. 10, 



ABC, or spun real fairy tales which never ended and which you 

 never wished to end. But this new Scottish youth, his first shyness 

 past, beat everything I had ever known. Genius shone from him ; 

 he held and drew you by the radiance of his eye and smile no less 

 than by the enthralling quality of his conversation. The new com- 

 pany in which he found himself drew him out, and jest and earnest, 

 wisdom and folly — folly of the illuminating kind which is sometimes 

 wiser than wisdom itself — streamed and flashed from him. 



He was only twenty-two, but seemed already to have lived and felt 

 and suffered and laughed and thought more than others do in a long 

 life-time. He seemed moreover to have read everything, at least 

 in English and French — for he was very little of a classical scholar — 

 and his mind and speech ran exultingly over the whole range of life 

 and literature, as the fingers of an inspired musician run over the 

 keyboard of an instrument. Grave argument and criticism and pure 

 poetic eloquence would alternate with bursts of riotous slang and 

 insanely apposite misquotation ; stale and vulgarised forms of speech 

 would gain brilliance and illuminating power from hitherto undreamt- 

 of applications ; and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill, a glow 

 of eager benignity and affectionate laughter, would diffuse itself from 

 the speaker, till everyone about him seemed to catch something of 

 his own gift and inspiration. This sympathetic power of inspiring 

 others has been noted by many of those who knew him as an especial 

 and distinguishing note of Stevenson's conversation. As long as he 

 was there you kept discovering with dehght unexpected powers in 

 yourself : you felt as if you had taken service with some wonderful 

 conjuror, whom you supplied with balls of clay and who took them 

 and transmuted them into gold and sent them spinning and whirling 

 and glowing about his head, and kindly made you believe all the 

 while that they were still truly your own. 



Underneath all this gaiety and charm it soon became clear that 

 there lay a troubled spirit, in risk from the perils of youth, from 

 acute distress over temporary misunderstandings at home, from a 

 constitution naturally frail and already overstrained, from self-distrust 

 and uncertainty as to his own powers and purposes. It was the good 

 fortune of his new friends to be able to strengthen, encourage, and 

 steady him. My own part in particular at this juncture was to make 

 him known to editors and get him a start on the path of literature, 

 to which his own instincts and private self-training were already 

 diffidently pointing. This, I have said, was in the summer of l%l?i. 

 A very close friendship ensued between us, which was maintained by 

 correspondence quite unbroken even after he had made his home in 

 a remote island of the Pacific. 



Twenty-one years had passed, when on a gusty, sodden r)ecem])er 

 day in 1894 I came down from lunching in a friend's rooms in 



