“You must not be vexed at my absences, you must understand I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days be done.  You don’t know how much I used to long for it in the old days; how I used to go and look at the trains leaving, and wish to go with them.  And now, you know, that I have a little more that is solid under my feet, you must take my nomadic habit as a part of me.  Just wait till I am in swing and you will see that I shall pass more of my life with you than elsewhere; only take me as I am and give me time.  I must be a bit of a vagabond.”

For all so little of his writing was ever done in his own country, nevertheless he turned to Scotland again and again for the setting of his stories and the subject of his essays.  Although he often spoke harshly of Edinburgh when at home, he paid her many loving tributes in writing of her in a foreign land:  “The quaint grey-castled city where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat....  I do not even know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out ’Oh, why left I my hame?’ and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my own country.  And although I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scotch clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year; there are no stars so lovely as the Edinburgh street lamps.  When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning.”

CHAPTER V

AMATEUR EMIGRANT

 “Hope went before them
  And the world was wide.”

In the summer of 1879 R.L.S. was once more seized with the desire to roam and to roam farther than ever before.  California had been beckoning to him for some time, and in August he suddenly made up his mind, and with scarcely a word of farewell to his family and friends he embarked on the steamship Devonia, bound for New York.

Partly for the sake of economy, for he determined to pay his own way on this venture, and partly because he was anxious to experience emigrant life, he engaged passage in the second cabin, which in those days differed very little from the steerage.  The main advantages were a trifle better food and a cabin to himself with a table where he could write.

In his usual way he soon made acquaintance with his fellow passengers and did them many a friendly turn.  They took him for one of themselves and showed little curiosity as to where he came from, who he was, or where he was going.  He says:  “The sailors called me ‘mate,’ the officers addressed me as ‘my man,’ my comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person of their own character and experience.  One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason, several, among these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to deny it.”