For what he knew must seem to his friends, and especially to his father, so wild an errand, he would ask for no supplies from home; but resolved, risking his whole future on the issue, to test during this adventure his power of supporting himself, and eventually others, by his own labours in literature. In order from the outset to save as much as possible, he made the journey in the steerage and the emigrant train. With this prime motive of economy was combined a second--that of learning for himself the pinch of life as it is felt by the unprivileged and the poor (he had long ago disclaimed for himself the character of a "consistent first-class passenger in life")--and also, it should be added, a third, that of turning his experiences to literary account. On board ship he took daily notes with this intent, and wrote moreover _The Story of a Lie_ for an English magazine. Arrived at his destination, he found his health, as was natural, badly shaken by the hardships of the journey; tried his favourite open-air cure for three weeks at an Angora goat-ranche some twenty miles from Monterey; and then lived from September to December in that old Californian coast-town itself, under the conditions set forth in the earlier of the following letters, and under a heavy combined strain of personal anxiety and literary effort. From the notes taken on board ship and in the emigrant train he drafted an account of his journey, intending to make a volume matching in form, though in contents much unlike, the earlier _Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with a Donkey_. He wrote also the essays on Thoreau and the Japanese reformer, Yoshida Torajiro, afterwards published in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_; one of the most vivid of his shorter tales, _The Pavilion on the Links_, hereinafter referred to as a "blood and thunder," as well as a great part of another and longer story drawn from his new experiences and called _A Vendetta in the West_; but this did not satisfy him, and was never finished. He planned at the same time, in the spirit of romantic comedy, that tale which took final shape four years later as _Prince Otto_. Towards the end of December 1879 Stevenson moved to San Francisco, where he lived for three months in a workman's lodging, leading a life of frugality amounting, it will be seen, to self-imposed penury, and working always with the same intensity of application, until his health utterly broke down. One of the causes which contributed to his illness was the fatigue he underwent in helping to watch beside the sickbed of a child, the son of his landlady. During a part of March and April he lay at death's door--his first really dangerous sickness since childhood--and was slowly tended back to life by the joint ministrations of his future wife and the physician to whom his letter of thanks will be found below. His marriage ensued in May 1880; immediately afterwards, to try and consolidate his recovery, he