Robert Louis Stevenson

Edinburgh lungs, a lawyer’s training he would not use, and a suitcase that never stayed shut. He wrote the donkey in the Cévennes, essays, a child’s garden of verses, then the books that ate the rest: an island with a map, a Highland flight, a respectable door that should not open after dark, a Scottish winter of brothers. Ill health chased him to Samoa. He died at forty-four with more Scotland still in the drawer. The pirate and the potion are the noise. The range is the author.