May Byron

A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson May Byron

Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been permitted to enter its doors-you might account yourself a somewhat favoured person. For the master of the house, "that rickety and cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the nonce-shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing hemorrhage. Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest you left contagion of that cold.