writes me sermons; it is good for me, but hardly the food necessary for a man who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts.  If one of you could write me a letter with a jest in it, a letter like what is written to real people in the world—­I am still flesh and blood—­I should enjoy it.  Simpson did the other day, and it did me as much good as a bottle of wine—­man alive I want gossip.”

Day in and day out he worked doggedly, fighting discouragement, with little strength or inspiration to write anything very worth while.

To cap all, his landlady’s little boy fell ill, and Stevenson, who had a great love and sympathy for all children, helped to nurse him, and this proved too much in the nervous and exhausted state he was in.  The boy recovered, but Stevenson fell ill again, and for six weeks hovered between life and death.

This seems to have been the turning-point in his ill luck.  Toward the middle of February, as he slowly began to mend, he was cheered on by long letters from home, full of anxiety for his health and advances of money from his father, with strict instructions that from now on he was no longer to stint and deny himself the bare necessities of life, as he had been doing.  Later, in April, came a telegram from Thomas Stevenson saying that in future Louis was to count on an income of two hundred and fifty pounds a year.

Cheered with the prospect of an easier road ahead of him, he struggled back to life once more with a strong resolve to work harder and make those at home proud of him.

“It was a considerable shock to my pride to break down,” he wrote to a friend, “but there it’s done and can not be helped.  Had my health held out another month, I should have made a year’s income, but breaking down when I did, I am surrounded by unfinished works.  It is a good thing my father was on the spot, or I should have had to work and die.”

Early in the spring he and Mrs. Osbourne met again, and on May 19, 1880, they were married in San Francisco.

For the rest of his life Stevenson had no cause to complain of loneliness, for in his wife he had an “inseparable sharer of all his adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all those who loved him; the most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses.”

Immediately after their marriage Stevenson and his wife and stepson—­and the dog—­went to the Coast Range Mountains and, taking possession of an old deserted miner’s camp, practically lived out-of-doors for the next few months, with no neighbors aside from a hunter and his family.

This was healthy, but the life of a squatter has its limitations, and their trials and tribulations during these weeks Stevenson told most amusingly in “The Silverado Squatters.”

Gradually a longing began to come to R.L.S. to see those at home once more and have them know his wife.  This desire grew so from day to day that July found them bidding good-by to California, and on the 7th of August they sailed from New York for Liverpool.