The most ambitious and, if one excepts the Child's Garden, the best of Stevenson's work in verse belongs to his thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth years. The ballad was a literary form which he did not attempt until his second visit to America. Ticonderoga, founded on a legend of the Camerons, was written at Saranac, and published in ' Scribner's Magazine,' December 1887. In the following year at Tautira in the island of Tahiti, he learnt the legend which in The Song of Rahero is told with a flood of savage gusto in keeping with its tragic subject. The ballad, and that of The Feast of Famine, in which were 'strung together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas,' were written during the stay at Tautira imposed by repairs to the ' Casco.' With Ticonderoga and the two shorter pieces, Heather Ale and Christmas at Sea, the latter of which had previously appeared in the 'Scots Observer,' December 22, 1888, they formed this volume, Ballads, issued in 1891.