The Pavilion On The Links - Hardcover

The recollection of that afternoon will always be graven on my mind. Northmour and I were persuaded that an attack was imminent; and if it had been in our power to alter in any way the order of events, that power would have been used to precipitate rather than delay the critical moment. The worst was to be anticipated; yet we could conceive no extremity so miserable as the suspense we were now suffering.

Robert Louis Stevenson was intended by his father to be an engineer, trained as a lawyer, and became a writer of stories of high adventure. They were devalued by the modernists but have come to be taken much more seriously by critics in recent years. Stevenson had poor health his whole life, but he still lived a live of adventure, spending many of his last years at sea in the South Pacific. He died at 44 and was buried on the Samoan island of Upolu.