He played a poor hand very, very well.

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

The Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson — author of such works as Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Master of Ballantrae, and A Child’s Garden of Verses — was one of those dealt a poor hand, but he played it very well.

He was sick, and sometimes near death, through much of his short life.  He traveled constantly, and particularly to the islands of the Pacific (including Hawaii) — which he came to love — in quest of a climate that would be healthy for him.

On his tomb in Samoa, his own slightly misquoted words provide his epitaph:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from [the] sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Posted from Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii