Will Hickock Low was born in Albany in 1852. Twenty-two years later, in 1874, he went to France to further his ambition to be a self-supporting artist. There he befriended Robert Louis Stevenson for life when he became a member of the author’s innermost circle of intimates, along with cousin Bob, Charles Baxter, William Henley, Graham Balfour, Edmund Gosse and Sidney Colvin.

In 1908, 16 years after Stevenson’s death, Low wrote a book and called it “A Chronicle of Friendships.” His preface explains that “This is a chronicle of small, unimportant happenings. The subsequent importance of one of the young men who figures therein (RLS) should be, I presume, its best excuse for being.” Along with Colvin, Balfour and Gosse, Low joined the brand-new Stevenson Society in Saranac Lake in 1916. To this day, three of Low’s paintings cover wall space in his old friend’s study at Baker’s, also known as the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage.

It was March 1883. Louis had Low in mind as he settled into his latest new home, a Swiss chalet seemingly misplaced on the French Riviera. Chalet La Solitude was the name he and his wife Fanny chose for it, and it was close to the little town of Hyeres. For Louis, at 32, this would be a prolific period of letter writing. Said Colvin, “There is perhaps no period of his life when his letters reflect so fully the variety of his moods and the eagerness of his occupations.” When Louis sat down to write his first letter from the chalet, it was the first of several from there to Will Low in New York City, whom he had last seen in Paris about five years past. “We have a chalet on a hill, looking out over the Mediterranean … a most sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain; and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins.”

Stevenson’s mood changed on Sept. 19 when news came to him of the death of an old friend, Walter Ferrier, who had long been in bad health but was not supposed to be in any immediate danger. It hit Louis like a ton of bricks. This was the first time the Grim Reaper had claimed a soul from his own crowd. To Low he wrote, “One of my oldest friends died recently; and this has given me new thoughts of death. Up to now I had rather thought of him as a mere personal enemy of my own; but now that I see him hunting after my friends, he looks altogether darker.” That winter Louis responded to the shock with a new essay, “Old Mortality.”

About this time Valentine Roch makes her entrance, a young, strong, intelligent French-Swiss girl who made a deal to work for and live with the Stevensons as their portable servant. She became devoted to Louis and took turns with Fanny watching over him during precarious episodes of illness. When Fanny and her husband were ill at the same time, Valentine tended to both of them. Louis had two nicknames for her, depending on her mood: “Joe” and “Thomasine.” Valentine had pledged never to quit the Stevensons and stuck to it. Finally, life with the couple got pretty extreme for “Joe” when she found herself living with cannibals in the Marquesas Islands and being reported as lost at sea somewhere between Tahiti and Hawaii. After six years of playing her role in the so-called Stevenson expedition, Valentine gave notice to Louis and Fanny in Honolulu and headed home. When said expedition was wintering in Saranac Lake in February 1888, Valentine came down with the flu and was quarantined in her 8-by-10-foot uninsulated room less than 25 feet from the writer’s room. Valentine can be seen standing at far left in the famous group photograph on Baker’s veranda, which appears in countless books.

“Penny Whistles” is perhaps the RLS project most associated with Stevenson’s residence at Hyeres. Some people say that Robert Louis Stevenson never grew up. His cousin and first biographer, Dr. Graham Balfour, said, “He had never made any affectation of abandoning a pursuit he was supposed to have outgrown. He clung to the colouring of prints and to childish paintings long after most boys of his age have given up the diversions of the nursery. A large part of the winter of 1877 (age 26) he spent in building with toy bricks and regretted that he had not been an architect. … Stevenson, deterred by no shame, extracted from toys much of the zest of reality, and raised their employment almost to the intensity of active life.” The sophisticated war-gaming that he played with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, using Lloyd’s army of tin soldiers, supports Balfour’s statement.

Other people say that RLS did grow up but was overendowed with empathetic qualities that somehow connected with a subconscious total recall of childhood that had been stimulated by the verses in Kate Greenaway’s “Birthday Book for Children,” with verses by Mrs. Sale Barker. It was his mother’s book, but Margaret let her son read it. When he was finished, he said, “These are very nice rhymes, and I don’t think they would be difficult to do.” So Louis began to write his own verses, refusing to call them poems, telling his friend, William Henley, “I shirk any title that might seem to claim that quality.” “Penny Whistles” was the title chosen for a trial version of 48 rhyme sets which he nicknamed “my ragged little regiment.” They were finally given the title by which they have been known and loved around the world ever since. With “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” RLS joined a universally recognized body of English quotation along with Shakespeare, Pope, Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Watts.

“Never was there a set of playful verses about children more completely free from mawkishness. There is no attempt to make them songs of innocence,” quoting one of the early reviews. Stevenson’s childhood nurse, Allison Cunningham, better known as “Cummy,” is the well-deserved dedicatee of the collection, “For the long nights you lay awake and watched for my unworthy sake …” But the forever boy in Louis, his Peter Pan within, is the true star shining from them all. He says:

TO ANY READER

As from the house your mother sees

You playing round the garden trees,

So you may see, if you will look

Through the windows of this book,

Another child, far, far away,

And in another garden play.

But do not think you can at all,

By knocking on the window, call

That child to hear you. He intent

Is all on his play-business bent.

He does not hear; he will not look,

Nor yet be lured out of this book.

For long ago, the truth to say,

He has grown up and gone away,

And it is but a child of air

Who lingers in the garden there.