The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables
1887
The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables
1887
Stevenson discards the bright adventure of Treasure Island for something far more unsettling: a collection of dark fables and psychological studies that probe the edges of human nature. The title novella unfolds on a remote Scottish island where Charles Darnaway arrives to claim his inheritance, only to find his uncle Gordon consumed by visions of Spanish Armada gold lost in the treacherous waves called the Merry Men. As greed and obsession take hold, the sea itself becomes a character, whispering secrets of shipwreck and death. The other tales venture further into supernatural territory, from a spectral servant in Thrawn Janet to a dying man's mysterious visitor in Markheim, each story stripping away the thin veneer of civilization to reveal what lurks beneath. These are not children's tales. They are unsettling examinations of guilt, obsession, and the darkness that lives in ordinary men.
Editions
X-Ray
“I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure (...). We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it - a cliff a mile high - high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Pure air - from the neighbourhood of a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine - unadulterated wine, and the reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works on nature - these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best religious comforts.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Your health, my darling, my studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how they would all have suffered, how they would all have been sacrificed! And for what? Children are the last word of human imperfection. Health flees before their face. They cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions; they demand to be fed, to be washed, to be educated, to have their noses blown; and then, when the time comes, they break our hearts, as I break this piece of sugar.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Think of me sometimes as one to whom the lesson of life was very harshly told, but who heard it with courage; as one who loved you indeed, but who hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her; as one who sent you away and yet would have longed to keep you for ever; who had no dearer hope than to forget you, and no greater fear than to be forgotten.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Never before had I so realised the miracle of the continued race, the creation and re-creation, the weaving and changing and handing down of fleshly elements. That a child should be born of its mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner of one ascendant, and offer its hand with the gesture of another, are wonders dulled for us by repetition.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“The river might run for ever; the birds fly higher and higher till they touched the stars. He saw it was empty bustle after all; for here, without stirring a foot, waiting patiently in his narrow valley, he also had attained the better sunlight.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a lover face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Did you ever see a squirrel turning in a cage? and another squirrel sitting philosophically over his nuts? I needn't ask you which of them looked more of a fool.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
