no 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



STEVENSON AND CALIFORNIA* 



By Cornelius Beach Bradley. 



Mr. President and Members of the Stevenson Fellow- 

 ship: The intimate and personal interest I take in the 

 little sheaf of Stevenson's Californian papers I cannot 

 wholly account for by the fact that I am a loyal Califor- 

 nian, long rooted in this soil, and familiar both with the 

 human types of our State and with the features and moods 

 of her physical beauty. Nor can I account for it by the 

 added fact that I am a student and admirer of the literary 

 art which Stevenson has so happily employed in illustrat- 

 ing these things. Both these sources of interest I have, 

 but both enhanced and heightened by a sense of having 

 somehow been brought very really within the personal 

 spell and charm of Stevenson's life. The man himself I 

 never knew, nor even saw. But she who was to become 

 the loving companiton and solace of all his later years was 

 a patron of the school in which I was then serving my 

 apprenticeship. Her son, whose name was destined to 

 be coupled with Stevenson's own in literary labor and in 

 fame, and her daughter — afterward Mrs. Strong — were 

 daily attendants in the classes there; while "Joe" Strong 

 himself, the future artist and son-in-law, a lad all uncon- 

 scious of impending fate, had for years been living in the 

 face of our staid and precise Oakland community a most 

 interesting and joyous life of perpetual picnic — father and 

 brothers and goats, and photographic wagon and gaunt 

 gray mare, forming with him as picturesque a group of 

 Bohemians as one could wish to see. And in that school 

 "Joe" learned the secret of that good fellowship and those 



•Response to a toast at a banquet in honor of Stevenson's birthday. Re- 

 printed from the University of California Chronicle, Vol. XI, No. 2. 

 Revised by the author for the Sierra Club Bulletin. 



