April 27 Friday – Sam may have gone for a short ride with Livy in the morning (see Apr. 28 to Crane). He then went to New York alone, Livy still too weak to travel. This is the likely day he met with Robert Louis Stevenson in Washington Square. Stevenson remembered in his Apr. 16, 1893 letter to Sam,

…that very pleasant afternoon we spent together in Washington Square among the nursemaids like a couple of characters out of a story by Henry James [MTNJ 3: 301n5].

Sam also remembered the meeting favorably. This from an April, 1904 Autobiographical dictation:

But it was on a bench in Washington Square that I saw the most of Louis Stevenson. It was an outing that lasted an hour or more and was very pleasant and sociable. I had come with him from his house, where I had been paying my respects to his family. His business in the square was to absorb the sunshine. He was most scantily furnished with flesh, his clothes seemed to fall into hollows as if there might be nothing inside but the frame for a sculptor’s statue. His long face and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed especially planned to gather the rags of your observation and focalize them upon Stevenson’s special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smoldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful [MTA 1: 246-7].

Note: Sam’s reference to paying his respects to Stevenson’s family does not necessarily conflict with Stevenson’s stay at St. Stephen’s Hotel on East 11th Street from Apr. 19 to 26 as Sam confirmed in his Apr. 15 & 17 to Stevenson, and entered in his notebook [3: 301]. Sam’s trip to Montreal from Apr. 19 to 21 would have precluded meeting earlier.

Paine also writes of their meeting, saying “Stevenson had orders to sit in the sunshine.” Sam’s “hour or more” became “during the few days of their association,” but was undoubtedly the former [MTB 3: 859].

Francis Hopkinson Smith sent a follow-up postcard: Hotel Brunswick 7 P.M. May 3, 1888 [MTP].

‡ See Addenda for corrected date of farewell supper for Irving and Terry to Mar. 26, 1888 plus private letter of General William Tecumseh Sherman.