It is a far cry from San Francisco to Saranac, yet Stevenson is their
connecting chain, with the late Harry Widener's amazing collection of
Stevensoniana, in his memorial library at Harvard, as a link. The
Saranac cottage, which on the day of my visit was surrounded by the
sweetest lilac blooms that ever perfumed the air, is still a place of
pilgrimage, and one by one new articles of interest are being added to
the collection. It was pleasant indeed to find an English author thus
honoured. Later, in Central Park, New York, I was to find statues of
Shakespeare, Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
It was, oddly enough, in the Adirondacks that I came upon my only
experience of simplified spelling in the land of its birth. It was in
that pleasant home from home, the Lake Placid Club, where one is adjured
to close the door "tyt" as one leaves a room; where one drinks "cofi";
and where that most necessary and mysterious of the functionaries of
life, the physician, is able to watch his divinity dwindle and his
dignity disappear under the style "fizisn."
STORIES AND HUMOURISTS
I heard many stories in America, where every one is a raconteur, but
none was better than this, which my San Francisco host narrated, from
his own experience, as the most perfect example of an honest answer ever
given. When a boy, he said, he was much in the company of an old trapper
in the Californian mountains.
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