style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">One fateful day in 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson went to fetch a bottle of wine from his cellar and was cut down by a stroke. Word of his collapse came over the wires like the worst of news. Henry James refused to believe it; Rudyard Kipling was so upset that he could not write for a month. Wretchedly, RLS had died at the age of 44.