ACROSS THE SEAS


As an advocate, Stevenson found ample time to pursue his chosen
profession of letters, for, during the winters in Edinburgh, he
wrote much, and gradually his essays, etc., appeared in magazines,
and are now gathered into happily named volumes. He spent the long
vacations, when the Courts had risen, abroad, mostly frequenting an
artist-colony in Fontainebleau. At that time he was full of a
project, in company with some congenial spirits, to form a
peripatetic club, buy a barge, and glide leisurely through Europe by
calm waterways. He had gone yachting one summer with a sea-loving
brother advocate up the west coast of Scotland. The memory of that
trip inhabited his mind, and he made his hero, David Balfour, when
"Kidnapped" sail by the self-same islands and seas. Louis was
persuaded by his boating friend, the following season, to embark
with him on a canoe trip through Belgium; and the log of that tour
became immortalised as An Inland Voyage, Stevenson's first book. His
travels did not end when he left his frail craft at Pontoise, for,
returning to Gretz, on the skirts of Fontainebleau, he first met his
future wife, and that led a few years later to his following her to
San Francisco, when she was free to remarry.

He crossed the Atlantic and America as an Emigrant. That mode of
life proved too hard for him. He had sailed and paddled without hurt
in his fleet and footless beast of burden, the Arethusa. In the
ensuing year (1877), he travelled "Through the Cevennes with a
Donkey," slept under starry skies, or camped in plumping rain. Often