Notes and Correspondence. 135 



re-established. But be that as it may; from here he saw the fog 

 from above; elsewhere he saw it from below. Who shall say- 

 that he did not gain inspiration therefrom, enabling him to see 

 humanity, Hkewise from a high vantage ground. Certainly he 

 knew the dull and sombre side of life : and just as certainly did 

 he try to show the bright, romantic and hopeful side of existence. 



"*As the sun brightens the world, so let our loving kindness 

 make bright this house of our habitation.' 



"There speaks a man who saw the good side of his fellowmen 

 and sought to make them gentler by the contagion of his own 

 unselfishness. 



"Stevenson lived, back in the 8o's at 608 Bush Street, within a 

 stone's throw almost of the building where the Sierra Club has 

 its rooms. It is not of record that he ever went on one of our 

 outings ; but literature would have been the richer by one rare 

 volume had he gone. His pen would have done justice to the 

 grandeur of crag and pass and meadow. The stern-faced cHffs 

 that color so warmly in the morning light, as if behind the gran- 

 ite features yearned kindly, human souls ; the blackness of night 

 under the pines, the stillness of noonday in the forests, the near- 

 ness of the eternal stars : these would have appealed to him. 



"He would have delighted in the camp and its drolleries. You 

 recall that in the "Amateur Emigrant" he defines the difference 

 between the Intermediate and the Steerage passengers. The 

 former paid a little more ; and had the privilege of saying whether 

 they preferred tea to coffee, though as far as Stevenson could 

 decide after trial there was no difference in the two. Well, we 

 Sierrans have seen our tea made in coffee pots and our coffee 

 in the wash-boiler. And many a time we have not even had the 

 privilege of saying which we preferred. Then again Intermediate 

 Emigrants had tables to eat from while the Steerage had none. 

 In this respect the Sierra Club is distinctly in the steerage. 



"Stevenson's life in San Francisco was at once both sad and 

 hopeful. He was out of his proper setting and out-at-the-elbows 

 in health. He came so near dying that he composed his epitaph, 

 which later in a somewhat modified form appeared as the well- 

 known requiem — 



" 'Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 

 And the hunter home from the hill.' 



"In that first rough draft of his own estimate of himself, his 

 final, as it seemed to him at the time, review of the book of life, 

 Stevenson included these words, 'of a family of engineers.' Yes, 

 there were engineers in his family and in his race. Watt and 

 Rankine and Thomson and a host of level-headed, far-seeing 

 master minds who harnessed the expansive power of water-vapor 



