Mrs. Stevenson.

I recall also that some of the mailsteamer passengers professed, we heard, that they were shocked because Mrs. Stevenson went about the deck barefooted. So did Stevenson himself sometimes in warm weather, but it was excused in him as an eccentricity of genius; in his wife it was Bohemianism run to excess. It is amusing to recall to-day the stifling propriety of the young Nineties. That was in a mail steamer, where passengers dressed with the utmost regard for the Respectabilities. It was different when they travelled in their own chartered schooner, and in the easy-going South Sea tramp Janet Nicoll, where everyone, from the Captain down, often went barefooted in the tropics.

By the way, writing again of the Janet Nicoll, Mrs. Stevenson made a curious blunder in her book on the cruise. She misspelled the steamer's name as Janet Nichol on the title-page and all through the book, a curious example of carelessness or want of observation.