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*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1905 edition. Scanned and
proofed by David Price, email
[email protected]
PRINCE OTTO - A ROMANCE
TO NELLY VAN DE GRIFT
(MRS. ADULFO SANCHEZ, OF MONTEREY)
AT last, after so many years, I have the pleasure of re-introducing you
to 'Prince Otto,' whom you will remember a very little fellow, no bigger
in fact than a few sheets of memoranda written for me by your kind
hand. The sight of his name will carry you back to an old wooden
house embowered in creepers; a house that was far gone in the
respectable stages of antiquity and seemed indissoluble from the green
garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger
days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship,
and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note
of the boatswain's whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript
inhabitants now so widely scattered:- the two horses, the dog, and the
four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines;
- the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author; - the China boy,
by this time, perhaps, baiting his line by the banks of a river in the
Flowery Land; - and in particular the Scot who was then sick
apparently unto death, and whom you did so much to cheer and keep in
good behaviour.
You may remember that he was full of ambitions and designs: so soon
as he had his health again completely, you may remember the fortune
he was to earn, the journeys he was to go upon, the delights he was to
enjoy and confer, and (among other matters) the masterpiece he was to
make of 'Prince Otto'!
Well, we will not give in that we are finally beaten. We read together in
those days the story of Braddock, and how, as he was carried dying
from the scene of his defeat, he promised himself to do better another
time: a story that will always touch a brave heart, and a dying speech
worthy of a more fortunate commander. I try to be of Braddock's mind.
I still mean to get my health again; I still purpose, by hook or crook,
this book or the next, to launch a masterpiece; and I still intend -
somehow, some time or other - to see your face and to hold your hand.
Meanwhile, this little paper traveller goes forth instead, crosses the
great seas and the long plains and the dark mountains, and comes at last
to your door in Monterey, charged with tender greetings. Pray you, take
him in. He comes from a house where (even as in your own) there are
gathered together some of the waifs of our company at Oakland: a
house - for all its outlandish Gaelic name and distant station - where
you are well-beloved.
R. L. S. Skerryvore, Bournemouth.
BOOK I - PRINCE ERRANT
CHAPTER I
- IN WHICH THE PRINCE DEPARTS ON AN ADVENTURE
You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of
Grunewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of
the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the
discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the
spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost.
Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the
very memory of her boundaries has faded.
It was a patch of hilly country covered with thick wood. Many streams
took their beginning in the glens of Grunewald, turning mills for the
inhabitants. There was one town, Mittwalden, and many brown,
wooden hamlets, climbing roof above roof, along the steep bottom of
dells, and communicating by covered bridges over the larger of the
torrents. The hum of watermills, the splash of running water, the clean
odour of pine sawdust, the sound and smell of the pleasant wind among
the innumerable army of the mountain pines, the dropping fire of
huntsmen, the dull stroke of the wood- axe, intolerable roads, fresh
trout for supper in the clean
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