From being a delicate child Robert grew up to be a man with very poor health. He suffered a great deal, in fact there was scarcely a day when he was free from pain. He once wrote a letter to a friend in which he made one of his few references to his sufferings. He said: “For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my day unflinchingly. I have written in bed and written out of it; written in hæmorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam from weakness and for so long it seems to me I have won my wager. The battle goes on, ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.” This certainly was not the kind of life that Robert Louis Stevenson’s great love of fun and action made it easy to accept. He longed for health and did everything he could to get it. He loved the woods and the fields, but generally when he would like to be there, he had to remain in bed. Yet, throughout it all, he showed a cheerfulness and a courage which have seldom been equalled. He had an unquenchable love of fun, and although he was often so ill that he could only carry on a conversation in whispers, or by writing with pencil, no one ever visited him who did not realise how wonderfully brave he was. When one learns of his physical condition it seems hardly possible that Stevenson could write these words: “If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness, If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face, If beams from happy human eyes, Have moved me not, if morning skies, Books, and my food and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain: Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake.”