A CHILD'S
GARDEN
of VERSES

By ROBERT
LOUIS
STEVENSON

ILLUSTRATED by
E. MARS
AND M. H. SQUIRE

RAND McNALLY &
COMPANY
CHICAGO
NEW YORK
LONDON

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

The Stevensons had been famous engineers for more than a hundred years, building lighthouses along the Scottish coast, and it was natural that his father should have expected Robert Louis to follow in the family footsteps. But the slim boy with brown eyes, who at eight had written a "History of Moses," and illustrated it with his own pen; who was slow to learn from books, but quick to understand things that he saw and felt; the boy who carried a volume of history in one pocket and a notebook in another, had other plans for himself, and even his father came to see the wisdom of his son's choice of a literary life. As early as 1873, when only twenty-three years old, Stevenson was ordered south for the winter by his physician, to ward off impending consumption. For more than twenty years, or until his death in Samoa late in 1894, he was never far from this pursuing enemy. It followed him over tossing seas and through many lands as he journeyed in search of health; yet through all these years he carried a brave and happy heart, and wrote at the end this Requiem, the last three lines of which are upon his tomb on the mountain-top in Samoa;

Robert Louis Stevenson's first book, "An Inland Voyage," was published in 1878, when he was twenty-eight years old, and is a fresh and charming account of a canoe trip up the rivers of Holland. It was during this journey that he wrote: "If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent around a drum before the hawthorn came into flower, what a work we should make about their beauty! But these things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe."

The next year came his "Travels With a Donkey," which told in the same naïve style the story of his journey through the Cevennes Mountains with no other companion than a donkey, whose gait he describes as being "As much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run."

He first visited America in 1879, in search of health, returning in 1880 to Scotland with Mrs. Stevenson, whom he had married in California. In 1887 he came again with the hope that a dry winter in the Adirondack Mountains would stand off the hand of Death. But he was little benefited, and took up his search for health by chartering a yacht for a voyage through the South Seas. It was on this trip that he fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the healthful climate of Samoa, and in 1890 he took up his home there, never again to leave the island except for occasional visits to Honolulu and Sydney. And when the time came for him to die, the natives, with their knives and axes cut a path up the steep mountain-side and carried him on their broad shoulders to his grave on the mountain-top.

"A Child's Garden of Verses" was first published in London in 1885, and long ago became a children's classic; yet it is now for the first time made available as a supplementary reader for the primary grades in a suitable form and at a possible price. There have been many and beautiful editions, but they have all appealed to "grown-ups" rather than to boys and girls to whom the book really belongs. To put such a book, with its simple style, its wise observations, its kindly sympathy, and fanciful humor into the hands of a boy or girl, is not only to make him happy, it is to start him on the straight path to culture.

This volume contains all the poems originally appearing under the title "A Child's Garden of Verses." The poems grouped under "The Child Alone," "Garden Days," and "Envoys" have been omitted, as many of them are too philosophical to be understood by children in the primary grades.

The illustrations in this book are used by special arrangement with Harper & Brothers of New York City, who publish the complete "Verses" in a beautiful edition suitable for the home or the library.

So with Stevenson's own words the book is yours:

E. O. G.

R. L. S.

A CHILD'S
GARDEN
of
VERSES

BED IN SUMMER