writer who equals him in this relish for reality of expression is Kipling. Further back it reminds of Defoe or Swift, at their best, Stevenson cannot abide the stock phrases with which most of us make shift to express our thoughts instead of using first-hand effects. There is, with all its music and suavity, something of the masculinity of the Old English in the following brief descriptive passage from "Ebb-Tide": There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the East; then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and silver; and then coals of fire. These glimmered awhile on the sea line, and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out; and still the night and the stars reigned undisturbed. It was as though a spark should catch and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after, and the whole East glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of heaven was filled with the daylight. The isle--the undiscovered, the scarce believed in--now lay before them and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate. Stevenson's similes, instead of illustrating concrete things by others less concrete, often reverse the process, as in the following: "The isle at this hour, with its smooth floor of sand, the pillared roof overhead and the pendant illumination of the lamps, wore an air of unreality, like a deserted theater or a public garden at midnight." Every image gets its foothold in some tap-root of reality.