It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque story together.  There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.

“We’ll extract information from him,” I said.

“How?”

“With corkscrews.”

But the mere suggestion of such a process was terribly distasteful to him; not that I really meant to go to these extreme lengths.  We never, of course, could really have worked together; and, his maladies increasing, he became more and more a wanderer, living at Bournemouth, at Davos, in the Grisons, finally, as all know, in Samoa.  Thus, though we corresponded, not unfrequently, I never was of the inner circle of his friends.  Among men there were school or college companions, or companions of Paris or Fontainebleau, cousins, like Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, or a stray senior, like Mr. Sidney Colvin.  From some of them, or from Mr. Stevenson himself, I have heard tales of “the wild Prince and Poins.”  That he and a friend travelled utterly without baggage, buying a shirt where a shirt was needed, is a fact, and the incident is used in “The Wrecker.”  Legend says that once he and a friend did possess a bag, and also, nobody ever knew why, a large bottle of scent.  But there was no room for the bottle in the bag, so Mr. Stevenson spilled the whole contents over the other man’s head, taking him unawares, that nothing might be wasted.  I think the tale of the endless staircase, in “The Wrecker,” is founded on fact, so are the stories of the atelier, which I have heard Mr. Stevenson narrate at the Oxford and Cambridge Club.  For a nocturnal adventure, in the manner of the “New Arabian Nights,” a learned critic already spoken of must be consulted.  It is not my story.  In Paris, at a cafe, I remember that Mr. Stevenson heard a Frenchman say the English were cowards.  He got up and slapped the man’s face.

“Monsieur, vous m’avez frappe!” said the Gaul.

“A ce qu’il parait,” said the Scot, and there it ended.  He also told me that years ago he was present at a play, I forget what play, in Paris, where the moral hero exposes a woman “with a history.”  He got up and went out, saying to himself: 

“What a play! what a people!”

“Ah, Monsieur, vous etes bien jeune!” said an old French gentleman.

Like a right Scot, Mr. Stevenson was fond of “our auld ally of France,” to whom our country and our exiled kings owed so much.

I rather vaguely remember another anecdote.  He missed his train from Edinburgh to London, and his sole portable property was a return ticket, a meerschaum pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne’s poems.  The last he found unmarketable; the pipe, I think, he made merchandise of, but somehow his provender for the day’s journey consisted in one bath bun, which he could not finish.