One September he took a walking trip in the Cevenne Mountains with no other companion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, who carried his pack and tried his patience by turns with her pace, which was “as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run,” as he tells in the chronicle of the trip.

A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a point in his life.  Heretofore the artists’ colony had been composed only of men.  This year there were three new arrivals, Americans, a Mrs. Osbourne and her young son and daughter.  Their home in California had been broken up and the mother had come to Grez to paint for the summer.

Those who had been there for a number of years, R.L.S. among them, looked on the newcomers as intruders and did not hesitate to say so among themselves.  Before the summer was over, however, they were obliged to confess that the newcomers had added to the charms of Grez, and Louis found in Mrs. Osbourne another companion to add to his rapidly growing list.

When the artists scattered in the autumn and he returned to Edinburgh and Mrs. Osbourne to California, he carried with him the hope that some time in the future they should be married.

For the next three years he worked hard.  He published numerous essays in the Cornhill Magazine and his first short stories, “A Lodging for the Night,” “Will O’ the Mill,” and the “New Arabian Nights.”  These were followed by his first books of travel, “An Inland Voyage,” giving a faithful account of the adventures of the Arethusa and the Cigarette, and “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.”

When the latter was published, Mr. Walter Crane made an illustration for it showing R.L.S. under a tree in the foreground in his sleeping-bag, smoking, while Modestine contentedly crops grass by his side.  Above him winds the path he is to take on his journey, encouraging Modestine with her burden to a livelier pace with his goad; receiving the blessing of the good monks at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows; stopping for a bite and sup at a wayside tavern; conversing with a fellow traveller by the way; and finally disappearing with the sunset over the brow of the hill.

Some time previous to all this he had written in a letter:  “Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me, and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our Infirmary, and may be for all I know eighteen months more.  Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace of blue air.”

This was William Ernest Henley, and his brave determination to live and work, though he knew he must ever remain in a maimed condition, roused Stevenson’s sincere admiration.  With his usual impetuous generosity, he brought him books and other comforts to make his prolonged stay in the infirmary less wearisome and a warm friendship sprang up between them.