“All through my boyhood and youth...  I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.  As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words. ...Thus I lived with words.  And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice.”

[Illustration:  STEVENSON AS A BOY.]

The next year, therefore, he decided to devote himself entirely to literature.

He was by heredity predisposed to weak lungs.  For the greater part of his life he moved from place to place, searching for some location that would improve his health and allow him to write.  He lived for a while in Switzerland, in the south of France, in the south of England, in the Adirondack Mountains, and in California.  In 1880 he married in California, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, of whom he wrote:—­

  “Steel-true and blade-straight,
  The great artificer made my mate.”

By a former marriage she had a son, who, at the age of thirteen, inspired Stevenson to write that exciting romance of adventure, Treasure Island, published in book form in 1883.  This and the remarkable story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), made him so famous that when he visited New York in 1887, a newspaper there offered him $10,000 for a weekly article during the year.

He preferred to accept an offer of $3500 for twelve monthly articles for a magazine.

The most romantic part of his life began in 1888, when he chartered a yacht in San Francisco for a cruise among the South Sea Islands.  He had the enthusiasm of a boy for this trip, which was planned to benefit his health.  Almost as many adventures befell him as Robinson Crusoe.  At one time Stevenson became so ill that he was left with his wife on one of the Society Islands while the yacht sailed away for repairs.  Before the boat returned, both his food and money were exhausted, and he and Mrs. Stevenson were forced to live on the bounty of the natives, who adopted him into one of their tribes and gave him the name of Tusitala.

He wandered for three and a half years among the islands of the Southern Pacific, visiting Australia twice.  On one trip he called at thirty-three small coral islands, and wrote, “Hackney cabs have more variety than atolls.”

He finally selected for his residence the island of Samoa, where he spent the last three and a half years of his life.  He died suddenly in his forty-fifth year, and was buried on the summit of a Samoan mountain near his home.

In 1893 he wrote to George Meredith:—­

“In fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly.  I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness...”

Many have found in Stevenson’s life an inspiration to overcome obstacles, to cease complaining, and to bear a message of good cheer.  These lines from his volume of poems called Underwoods (1887), are especially characteristic:—­