Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/174

STEVENSON'S BOOKS N sunny Samoa, more thousands of miles away than the ungeographical can count, sits "The Scot Abroad." For thus Burton, the historian, sane, sage, and wise, wrote of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson before his time. It is the wont of Scotland that her sons, for adventure or merchandise, should early expatriate themselves. The ships of the world in all seas are engineered from the Clyde, and a "doon-the-watter" accent is considered as necessary as lubricating oil, in order that the plunging piston rods may really enjoy their rhythmic dance. If you step ashore anywhere "east of Suez and the Ten Commandments," ten to one the first man of your tongue who greets you will hail in the well-remembered accent of the Scotch gardener who chased you out of the strawberry plots of your unblessed youth.

But to us who "stop at home, on flowery beds of ease," made aware of ourselves only when the east wind blows and we think that we are back in St. Andrews, the typical "Scot Abroad" is neither Burton's Gentleman Companion at Arms nor the oily chief engineer, but Mr. Stevenson.

On high in a cool bowery room on the hillside, looking down on the league-long rollers forming themselves to be hurled on the shore, sits one with his heels on the coco-matting of Samoa, but his head over the Highland border. The chiefs gather for palaver (or whatever they are pleased to call hunkering-and-blethering out there), and they tell the Tale-teller of heads taken and plantations raided. And he stays his pen and arbitrates, or he "leaves for the front," as though he were plenipotentiary of the Triple Alliance. But all the while it is James More Macgregor who is marching out arrayed in a breech-clout and a Winchester "to plunder and to ravish"—or carry off an heiress lass from the lowlands, as was good Macgregor use-and-wont.

They call the beautiful new complete "Stevenson" which Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. Charles Baxter have contrived and organised, the "Edinburgh" edition, because though the stars of the tropics glow like beacons, and in Apia the electric light winks a-nights like glow-worms amid a wilderness of green leaves, yet to the lad who sits aloft there are still "no stars like the Edinburgh street lamps." But my own local enthusiasms are duller, for the last night I was in Edinburgh I saw a wind (Rajputana and Edinburgh are the only two places where you can see wind)—I saw a wind, with the bit between its teeth, run off with itself down that romantic wall of hotels, which in the night looks like the thunder-