Stevenson’s picnics are squibs embedded in Essays of Travel: Essays in the Art of Writing. “An Autumn Effect” is memorable for the phrase “the spirit of picnic.” “The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing, ” Stevenson writes, “every here and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait for smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take a draught.”
In “Forest Notes,” Stevenson sometimes writes instead of having dinner indoors, he and his friends decided on a night picnic instead. Organized in a procession: “we file down the long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old bandits’ haunt, and shows shapely beards, and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest. And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn.”
See Robert Louis Stevenson. Essays of Travel: Essays in the Art of Writing. London, 1876