The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 02Stevenson, Robert Louis
General
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 02
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
Mrs. Hanson (_nee_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and
with a large sunbonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure
you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was
of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage
and the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy,
and fair; he came far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business,
or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the
occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and
turned our red canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept
house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they
want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with
Rufe--housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides
a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine
Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on
the subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries,
whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all
cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation. And this is
surely the more notable where the names are all so strange, and even
the family names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the
ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry
in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of
literature. But still times change; and their next descendants, the
George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon the
point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine
Lovelands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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