Classic short story, set in California. According to Wikipedia: ‘Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 – 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who ‘seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins’, as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson’s popularity and allow him a place in the canon.’