While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to
rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a
Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's
death, it had remained unsold. His mother, on returning to Scotland
when bereft of her boy, asked to see the picture again. She had
disapproved of it in Samoa, as it was over true a likeness,
representing him sadly emaciated. Seeing it again, she revoked her
former judgment, and wished to possess it, but the purchaser also
had grown to prize it. So it hangs in her drawing-room, near by
where the Eildons stand sentinel over Scott's resting-place. This
picture of him who lies on Vaea's crest looks down with a slightly
quizzical expression, as if amused at finding himself ensconced in a
place of honour in the house of strangers on Tweedside. Photographs
there are in plenty of Stevenson, and one snapshot, enlarged in the
Edinburgh Edition, recalls him looking up with "long, hatchet face,
black hair, and haunting gaze, that follows as you move about the
room.
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