Love launched the haphazard six-thousand-mile odyssey that the twenty-five-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson recounts in this memoir and travel book. For it was during a trip to France that Stevenson fell so totally in love with the vivacious Fanny Osbourne that he determined to follow her to America and make her his wife. No matter that an ocean and a continent, not to mention Fanny's difficult husband, stood between Stevenson and his amorous aim.<BR>Sailing from Scotland in 1879 as a steerage passenger on a steamer of dubious seaworthiness, the sickly Stevenson first endured a turbulent Atlantic crossing and then, after a frenetic stopover in New York City, embarked on the two-week trip of three thousand miles across the continent the fastest and cheapest way possible - by emigrant train. He arrived finally in the frontier town of San Francisco, there to woo his future wife, and found himself enchanted by California as well.<BR>In his record of this journey Stevenson captures the spirit of the young country he traveled, relishes the antics of the rambunctious inhabitants he encountered, and renders in vivid and often hilarious detail his impressions of the awesome, still-untamed American continent he discovered.