At the same time, seizing and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising, under the circumstances, alike by quantity and quality. During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays _Admiral Guinea_ and _Beau Austin_ were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley, and many other dramatic schemes were broached which health and leisure failed him to carry out. In the course of the next few months he finished _Prince Otto_, _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and _More New Arabian Nights_, all three of which had been begun, and the two first almost completed, before he left Hyeres. He at the same time attacked two new tasks--a highway novel called _The Great North Road_, and a _Life of Wellington_ for a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, both of which he had in the sequel to abandon; and a third, the boys' story of _Kidnapped_, which in its turn had to be suspended, but on its publication next year turned out one of the most brilliant of his successes. About midsummer of this year, 1885, he was distressed by the sudden death of his old and kind friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin, and after a while undertook the task of writing a memoir of him to be prefixed to his collected papers. Towards the close of the same year he was busy with what proved to be the most popular of all his writings, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and with the Christmas story of _Olalla_. _Jekyll and Hyde_ was published in January 1886, and after threatening for the first week or two to fall flat, in no long time caught the attention of all classes of readers, was quoted from a hundred pulpits, and made the writer's name familiar to multitudes both in England and America whom it had never reached before. A success scarcely inferior, though of another kind, was made a few months afterwards by _Kidnapped_, which Stevenson had taken up again in the early spring, and which was published about midsummer. After completing this task in March, he was able to do little work during the remainder of the year, except in preparing materials for the _Life of Fleeming Jenkin_, and in writing occasional verses which helped to make up the collection published in the following year under the title _Underwoods_. In the early autumn of the same year, 1886, he took a longer and more successful excursion from home than usual, staying without breakdown for two or three weeks at the Monument, as he always called my house at the British Museum, and seeing something of kindred spirits among his elders, such as Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, the painters Burne-Jones and W. B. Richmond, and others who had hitherto delighted in his work and now learned to delight no less in his society.