I passed many months in Grez. Here again I met the trail of Stevenson, only too late. He had started the habit of going there, and I saw the actual garret room which he speaks about in the _Treasure of Franchard_. It was here that the mummer died—while the big shadows were dancing about the walls—and left the boy to the doctor. The same landlady was bustling around the inn, and during my stay, as business was none too good (or else she was a generous provider and therefore a bad manager), we had to give her our money beforehand or there would be no dinner. John Runciman was one of the bright, particular lights at the inn. He was a very unconscious man with a brave brain and would quietly say anything he pleased. He was also a musician of no mean attainment and could sit at the piano with his back turned to the keys and play Chopin well enough to suit _me_. He had the audacity to write the musical criticisms for the _Saturday Review_ (Frank Harris being the editor at the time), and all the time he was living in the Fontainebleau Forest! I asked him how he could manage to satisfy his readers without having heard the concerts. “Oh,” he replied, “one conductor always plays too fast, and a certain soprano invariably breaks on her high C. Besides, I know all the music, and the public does not want anything new in the way of criticism.” Runciman once showed me a magazine which he had saved, with an article by Stevenson telling how he had written _Treasure Island_. He was down in Bournemouth for his health, and at the same place was a little boy who was dying of tuberculosis. Stevenson composed the tale for him and got him to draw the map of the island as he had imagined it. This he sent with the manuscript, to London to the publisher. Through some carelessness in the office, the boy’s drawing was lost, and, although Robert Louis Stevenson tried to do it from memory, he declared it was greatly inferior to the naïve child’s fancy. I hesitate to tell about something that I have always thought very beautiful, and that is the song of the nightingale, but I remember some typical Gopher Prairie people coming to Grez and, doubtless, being disappointed at the abandoned street, the dogs, and the hens, when remaining up especially to hear the songbird, said that they had been awakened many times by that sound, but had “always thought it was the croaking of frogs.” However it may have sounded to the Middle West, it was sufficiently beautiful to my untrained musical ear to make me journey back to Grez twenty years later to hear it again. You can take a scientific or sentimental view of the flight of the queen bee, and I prefer to hold with Maeterlinck.