“Though I write so little, I pass all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspondence.  I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it does not get written; autant en emportent les vents; but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship.  To-day, for instance, we had a great talk.  I was toiling, the sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of rain; methought you asked me—­frankly, was I happy?  Happy (said I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres; it came to an end from a variety of reasons—­decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps; since then, as before then, I know not what it means.  But I know pleasures still; pleasure with a thousand faces and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them with scratching nails.  High among these I place the delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds.  And take my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down—­I would not change my circumstances, unless it were to bring you here.  And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I commune so continually with the thought of you.  I say ‘I wonder’ for a form; I know, and I know I should not.”

In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange—­nothing that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already formed in our own minds.  Our mental portraits of some other writers, drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private correspondence came to be published.  If any of us dreamed of this danger in Stevenson’s case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at any rate is past.  The man of the letters is the man of the books—­the same gay, eager, strenuous, lovable spirit, curious as ever about life and courageous as ever in facing its chances.  Profoundly as he deplores the troubles in Samoa, when he hears that war has been declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement.  “War is a huge entrainement,” he writes in June, 1893; “there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one.  We were all wet, we had been five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at.”

And that his was not by any means mere “literary” courage one more extract will prove.  One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly gone mad:—­