Page:The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima Edition, Volume 8, 1922.djvu/99

 PREFATORY NOTE

ERY few of my husband's poems were conceived with any other purpose than the entertainment of the moment. The Scotsman's Return from Abroad was written to amuse his father when we were stopping with the family in Strathpeffer, a dreary "hydropathic" in the Highlands. Seven years after, in August, 1887, we were summoned by telegram to Edinburgh, where my father-in-law was fighting death inch by inch. His memory gone, his reason shattered, nothing remained but his determined will. It was a terrible figure we found sitting grimly in the drawing-room of the house at Heriot Row; for it was not until an hour or two before his death, on the evening of our arrival, that he could be persuaded to lie upon his bed, and then only after a narcotic had been administered.

During the gloomy days that followed, my husband, who occupied the rooms that had been set apart for him in his boyhood, with the many evidences of his father's affection surrounding him on every side,—the books on the shelves, the childish 85