THE LETTERS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON

TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS

SELECTED AND EDITED WITH
NOTES AND INTRODUCTION BY

SIDNEY COLVIN

VOLUME II

LONDON
METHUEN AND CO.
36 ESSEX STREET

Seventh Edition

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], January 1st, 1886.

DEAREST KATHARINE,—Here, on a very little book and accompanied with lame verses, I have put your name.  Our kindness is now getting well on in years; it must be nearly of age; and it gets more valuable to me with every time I see you.  It is not possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to try, at least between us.  You know very well that I love you dearly, and that I always will.  I only wish the verses were better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you by the one that loves you—Jekyll, and not Hyde.

R. L. S.

Ave!

Bells upon the city are ringing in the night;
High above the gardens are the houses full of light;
On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free;
And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.

We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind,
Still we’ll be the children of the heather and the wind;
Far away from home, O, it’s still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie!

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], 1st, 1886.

MY DEAR KINNICUM,—I am a very bad dog, but not for the first time.  Your book, which is very interesting, came duly; and I immediately got a very bad cold indeed, and have been fit for nothing whatever.  I am a bit better now, and aye on the mend; so I write to tell you, I thought of you on New Year’s Day; though, I own, it would have been more decent if I had thought in time for you to get my letter then.  Well, what can’t be cured must be endured, Mr. Lawrie; and you must be content with what I give.  If I wrote all the letters I ought to write, and at the proper time, I should be very good and very happy; but I doubt if I should do anything else.

I suppose you will be in town for the New Year; and I hope your health is pretty good.  What you want is diet; but it is as much use to tell you that as it is to tell my father.  And I quite admit a diet is a beastly thing.  I doubt, however, if it be as bad as not being allowed to speak, which I have tried fully, and do not like.  When, at the same time, I was not allowed to read, it passed a joke.  But these are troubles of the past, and on this day, at least, it is proper to suppose they won’t return.  But we are not put here to enjoy ourselves: it was not God’s purpose; and I am prepared to argue, it is not our sincere wish.  As for our deserts, the less said of them the better, for somebody might hear, and nobody cares to be laughed at.  A good man is a very noble thing to see, but not to himself; what he seems to God is, fortunately, not our business; that is the domain of faith; and whether on the first of January or the thirty-first of December, faith is a good word to end on.

My dear Cummy, many happy returns to you and my best love.—The worst correspondent in the world,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], January 1st, 1886.

MY DEAR PEOPLE,—Many happy returns of the day to you all; I am fairly well and in good spirits; and much and hopefully occupied with dear Jenkin’s life.  The inquiry in every detail, every letter that I read, makes me think of him more nobly.  I cannot imagine how I got his friendship; I did not deserve it.  I believe the notice will be interesting and useful.

My father’s last letter, owing to the use of a quill pen and the neglect of blotting-paper, was hopelessly illegible.  Every one tried, and every one failed to decipher an important word on which the interest of one whole clause (and the letter consisted of two) depended.

I find I can make little more of this; but I’ll spare the blots.—Dear people, ever your loving son,

R. L. S.

I will try again, being a giant refreshed by the house being empty.  The presence of people is the great obstacle to letter-writing.  I deny that letters should contain news (I mean mine; those of other people should).  But mine should contain appropriate sentiments and humorous nonsense, or nonsense without the humour.  When the house is empty, the mind is seized with a desire—no, that is too strong—a willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes (in me) the true spirit of correspondence.  When I have no remarks to offer (and nobody to offer them to), my pen flies, and you see the remarkable consequence of a page literally covered with words and genuinely devoid of sense.  I can always do that, if quite alone, and I like doing it; but I have yet to learn that it is beloved by correspondents.  The deuce of it is, that there is no end possible but the end of the paper; and as there is very little left of that—if I cannot stop writing—suppose you give up reading.  It would all come to the same thing; and I think we should all be happier . . .

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], Jan. 2nd, 1886.

MY DEAR LOW,—Lamia has come, and I do not know how to thank you, not only for the beautiful art of the designs, but for the handsome and apt words of the dedication.  My favourite is ‘Bathes unseen,’ which is a masterpiece; and the next, ‘Into the green recessed woods,’ is perhaps more remarkable, though it does not take my fancy so imperiously.  The night scene at Corinth pleases me also.  The second part offers fewer opportunities.  I own I should like to see both Isabella and the Eve thus illustrated; and then there’s Hyperion—O, yes, and Endymion!  I should like to see the lot: beautiful pictures dance before me by hundreds: I believe Endymion would suit you best.  It also is in faery-land; and I see a hundred opportunities, cloudy and flowery glories, things as delicate as the cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil: the feast of Pan, Peona’s isle, the ‘slabbed margin of a well,’ the chase of the butterfly, the nymph, Glaucus, Cybele, Sleep on his couch, a farrago of unconnected beauties.  But I divagate; and all this sits in the bosom of the publisher.

What is more important, I accept the terms of the dedication with a frank heart, and the terms of your Latin legend fairly.  The sight of your pictures has once more awakened me to my right mind; something may p. 10come of it; yet one more bold push to get free of this prisonyard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries.  I do not know, I have a feeling in my bones, a sentiment which may take on the forms of imagination, or may not.  If it does, I shall owe it to you; and the thing will thus descend from Keats even if on the wrong side of the blanket.  If it can be done in prose—that is the puzzle—I divagate again.  Thank you again: you can draw and yet you do not love the ugly: what are you doing in this age?  Flee, while it is yet time; they will have your four limbs pinned upon a stable door to scare witches.  The ugly, my unhappy friend, is de rigueur: it is the only wear!  What a chance you threw away with the serpent!  Why had Apollonius no pimples?  Heavens, my dear Low, you do not know your business. . . .

I send you herewith a Gothic gnome for your Greek nymph; but the gnome is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears.  It is not always the time to rejoice.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

The gnome’s name is Jekyll & Hyde; I believe you will find he is likewise quite willing to answer to the name of Low or Stevenson.

Same day.—I have copied out on the other sheet some bad verses, which somehow your picture suggested; as a kind of image of things that I pursue and cannot reach, and that you seem—no, not to have reached—but to have come a thought nearer to than I.  This is the life we have chosen: well, the choice was mad, but I should make it again.

What occurs to me is this: perhaps they might be printed in (say) the Century for the sake of my name; and if that were possible, they might advertise your book.  It might be headed as sent in acknowledgment of your Lamia.  Or perhaps it might be introduced by the phrases I have marked above.  I dare say they would stick it in: p. 11I want no payment, being well paid by Lamia.  If they are not, keep them to yourself.

Damned bad lines in return for a beautiful book

Youth now flees on feathered foot.
Faint and fainter sounds the flute;
Rarer songs of Gods.
                                 And still,
Somewhere on the sunny hill,
Or along the winding stream,
Through the willows, flits a dream;
Flits, but shows a smiling face,
Flees, but with so quaint a grace,
None can choose to stay at home,
All must follow—all must roam.
This is unborn beauty: she
Now in air floats high and free,
Takes the sun, and breaks the blue;—
Late, with stooping pinion flew
Raking hedgerow trees, and wet
Her wing in silver streams, and set
Shining foot on temple roof.
Now again she flies aloof,
Coasting mountain clouds, and kissed
By the evening’s amethyst.
In wet wood and miry lane
Still we pound and pant in vain;
Still with earthy foot we chase
Waning pinion, fainting face;
Still, with grey hair, we stumble on
Till—behold!—the vision gone!
Where has fleeting beauty led?
To the doorway of the dead!
qy. omit? [Life is gone, but life was gay:
We have come the primrose way!] [11]

R. L. S.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886.

MY DEAR GOSSE,—Thank you for your letter, so interesting to my vanity.  There is a review in the St. James’s, which, as it seems to hold somewhat of your opinions, and is besides written with a pen and not a poker, we think may possibly be yours.  The Prince [12] has done fairly well in spite of the reviews, which have been bad: he was, as you doubtless saw, well slated in the Saturday; one paper received it as a child’s story; another (picture my agony) described it as a ‘Gilbert comedy.’  It was amusing to see the race between me and Justin M’Carthy: the Milesian has won by a length.

That is the hard part of literature.  You aim high, and you take longer over your work, and it will not be so successful as if you had aimed low and rushed it.  What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be a little dull into the bargain.  I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is by an accident.  And I know also that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the doing of the public; they are only shamed into silence or affectation.  I do not write for the public; I do write for money, a nobler deity; and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home.

Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed.  What he likes is the newspaper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient, and ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit.  I do not like mankind; but men, and not all p. 13of these—and fewer women.  As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called ‘the public,’ God save me from such irreligion!—that way lies disgrace and dishonour.  There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular.

This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my sedate and permanent opinion.  Not much, I think.  As for the art that we practise, I have never been able to see why its professors should be respected.  They chose the primrose path; when they found it was not all primroses, but some of it brambly, and much of it uphill, they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy martyrs.  But a man is never martyred in any honest sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and delirium tremens has more of the honour of the cross.  We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to live by a pleasure.  We should be paid if we give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured?

I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a Sunday; but we must wait till I am able to see people.  I am very full of Jenkin’s life; it is painful, yet very pleasant, to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter.  I own, as I read, I wonder more and more why he should have taken me to be a friend.  He had many and obvious faults upon the face of him; the heart was pure gold.  I feel it little pain to have lost him, for it is a loss in which I cannot believe; I take it, against reason, for an absence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I still fancy I shall see him in the door; and then, now when I know him better, how glad a meeting!  Yes, if I could believe in the immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but we were put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire: the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for p. 14a man who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality.  The soul of piety was killed long ago by that idea of reward.  Nor is happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind seeks.  Happinesses are but his wayside campings; his soul is in the journey; he was born for the struggle, and only tastes his life in effort and on the condition that he is opposed.  How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions—how can he be rewarded but by rest?  I would not say it aloud; for man’s cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior happiness exactly fits him.  He does not require to stop and taste it; he can be about the rugged and bitter business where his heart lies; and yet he can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and enjoy the notion that he is both himself and something else; and that his friends will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and still be lovable,—as if love did not live in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its breath in an unbroken round of forgiveness!  But the truth is, we must fight until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet for mankind but complete resumption into—what?—God, let us say—when all these desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last.

Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short—excusez.

R. L. S.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886.

DEAR JAMES PAYN,—Your very kind letter came very welcome; and still more welcome the news that you see p. 15—’s tale.  I will now tell you (and it was very good and very wise of me not to tell it before) that he is one of the most unlucky men I know, having put all his money into a pharmacy at Hyères, when the cholera (certainly not his fault) swept away his customers in a body.  Thus you can imagine the pleasure I have to announce to him a spark of hope, for he sits to-day in his pharmacy, doing nothing and taking nothing, and watching his debts inexorably mount up.

To pass to other matters: your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter remains for me undecipherable.  I call her, then, your daughter—and a very good name too—and I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house.  The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on each side.  Now the true house is the one before the hospital: is that No. 11?  If not, what do you complain of?  If it is, how can I help what is true?  Everything in the Dynamiter is not true; but the story of the Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I lay my hand on my heart and swear to it.  It took place in that house in 1884; and if your daughter was in that house at the time, all I can say is she must have kept very bad society.

But I see you coming.  Perhaps your daughter’s house has not a balcony at the back?  I cannot answer for that; I only know that side of Queen Square from the pavement and the back windows of Brunswick Row.  Thence I saw plenty of balconies (terraces rather); and if there is none to the particular house in question, it must have been so arranged to spite me.

I now come to the conclusion of this matter.  I address three questions to your daughter:—

1st.   Has her house the proper terrace?

2nd.  Is it on the proper side of the hospital?

3rd.  Was she there in the summer of 1884?

You see, I begin to fear that Mrs. Desborough may p. 16have deceived me on some trifling points, for she is not a lady of peddling exactitude.  If this should prove to be so, I will give your daughter a proper certificate, and her house property will return to its original value.

Can man say more?—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

I saw the other day that the Eternal had plagiarised from Lost Sir Massingberd: good again, sir!  I wish he would plagiarise the death of Zero.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. Somethingorother-th, 1886.

MY DEAR LOW,—I send you two photographs: they are both done by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet’s son, which may interest.  The sitting down one is, I think, the best; but if they choose that, see that the little reflected light on the nose does not give me a turn-up; that would be tragic.  Don’t forget ‘Baronet’ to Sir Percy’s name.

We all think a heap of your book; and I am well pleased with my dedication.—Yours ever,

R. L. Stevenson.

P.S.—Apropos of the odd controversy about Shelley’s nose: I have before me four photographs of myself, done by Shelley’s son: my nose is hooked, not like the eagle, indeed, but like the accipitrine family in man: well, out of these four, only one marks the bend, one makes it straight, and one suggests a turn-up.  This throws a flood of light on calumnious man—and the scandal-mongering sun.  For personally I cling to my curve.  To continue the Shelley controversy: I have a look of him, p. 17all his sisters had noses like mine; Sir Percy has a marked hook; all the family had high cheek-bones like mine; what doubt, then, but that this turn-up (of which Jeaffreson accuses the poet, along with much other fatras) is the result of some accident similar to what has happened in my photographs by his son?

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 25, 1886.]

MY DEAR FATHER,—Many thanks for a letter quite like yourself.  I quite agree with you, and had already planned a scene of religion in Balfour; the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge furnishes me with a catechist whom I shall try to make the man.  I have another catechist, the blind, pistol-carrying highway robber, whom I have transferred from the Long Island to Mull.  I find it a most picturesque period, and wonder Scott let it escape.  The Covenant is lost on one of the Tarrans, and David is cast on Earraid, where (being from inland) he is nearly starved before he finds out the island is tidal; then he crosses Mull to Toronsay, meeting the blind catechist by the way; then crosses Morven from Kinlochaline to Kingairloch, where he stays the night with the good catechist; that is where I am; next day he is to be put ashore in Appin, and be present at Colin Campbell’s death.  To-day I rest, being a little run down.  Strange how liable we are to brain fag in this scooty family!  But as far as I have got, all but the last chapter, I think David is on his feet, and (to my mind) a far better story and far sounder at heart than Treasure Island.

I have no earthly news, living entirely in my story, and only coming out of it to play patience.  The Shelleys are gone; the Taylors kinder than can be imagined.  The other day, Lady Taylor drove over and called on me; she is a delightful old lady, and great fun.  I mentioned a p. 18story about the Duchess of Wellington which I had heard Sir Henry tell; and though he was very tired, he looked it up and copied it out for me in his own hand.—Your most affectionate son,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Feb. 13th, 1886.

MY DEAR STODDARD,—I am a dreadful character; but, you see, I have at last taken pen in hand; how long I may hold it, God knows.  This is already my sixth letter to-day, and I have many more waiting; and my wrist gives me a jog on the subject of scrivener’s cramp, which is not encouraging.

I gather you were a little down in the jaw when you wrote your last.  I am as usual pretty cheerful, but not very strong.  I stay in the house all winter, which is base; but, as you continue to see, the pen goes from time to time, though neither fast enough nor constantly enough to please me.

My wife is at Bath with my father and mother, and the interval of widowery explains my writing.  Another person writing for you when you have done work is a great enemy to correspondence.  To-day I feel out of health, and shan’t work; and hence this so much overdue reply.

I was re-reading some of your South Sea Idyls the other day: some of the chapters are very good indeed; some pages as good as they can be.

How does your class get along?  If you like to touch on Otto, any day in a by-hour, you may tell them—as the author’s last dying confession—that it is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy-mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air-bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the p. 19too great realism of some chapters and passages—some of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot—which disprepares the imagination for the cast of the remainder.

Any story can be made true in its own key; any story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style: Otto is made to reel like a drunken—I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher—by the variations of the key.  Have you observed that the famous problem of realism and idealism is one purely of detail?  Have you seen my ‘Note on Realism’ in Cassell’s Magazine of Art; and ‘Elements of Style’ in the Contemporary; and ‘Romance’ and ‘Humble Apology’ in Longman’s?  They are all in your line of business; let me know what you have not seen and I’ll send ’em.

I am glad I brought the old house up to you.  It was a pleasant old spot, and I remember you there, though still more dearly in your own strange den upon a hill in San Francisco; and one of the most San Francisco-y parts of San Francisco.

Good-bye, my dear fellow, and believe me your friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth [Spring 1886].

MY DEAR SYMONDS,—If we have lost touch, it is (I think) only in a material sense; a question of letters, not hearts.  You will find a warm welcome at Skerryvore from both the lightkeepers; and, indeed, we never tell ourselves one of our financial fairy tales, but a run to Davos is a prime feature.  I am not changeable in friendship; and I think I can promise you you have a pair of trusty well-wishers and friends in Bournemouth: whether they write or not is but a small thing; the flag may not be waved, but it is there.

p. 20Jekyll is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members.  This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future.

Raskolnikoff [20] is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it.  Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me.  It was like having an illness.  James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show.  To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified.  The Juge d’Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation: the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protaplasmic humanity of Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder: the execution also, superb in places.  Another has been translated—Humiliés et Offensés.  It is even more incoherent than Le Crime et le Châtiment, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power.  Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure.  Have you heard that he became a stout, imperialist conservative?  It is interesting to know.  To something of that side, the balance leans with me also in view of the incoherency and incapacity of all.  The old boyish idea of the march on Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I know the worst assails me.  Fundamental errors in human p. 21nature of two sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations.  First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness consists of anything but an internal harmony.  Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success—the elements our friends wish to eliminate.  And, on the other hand, happiness is a question of morality—or of immorality, there is no difference—and conviction.  Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted a via media, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same.  It is quite an open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy; on the other hand, there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy.  He was right (if he said it) that he was la misère humaine, cureless misery—unless perhaps by the gallows.  Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had justice done it, no, not by Whitman.  As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (quorum pars), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch of life.  Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two flaunting emblems of their hollowness.

God knows where I am driving to.  But here comes my lunch.

Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue.  I have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle.  Pray don’t fail to come this summer.  It will be a great disappointment, now it has been spoken of, if you do.—Yours ever,

Robert Louis Stevenson

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]

MY DEAR LOW,—This is the most enchanting picture.  Now understand my state: I am really an invalid, but of a mysterious order.  I might be a malade imaginaire, but for one too tangible symptom, my tendency to bleed from the lungs.  If we could go, (1st)  We must have money enough to travel with leisure and comfort—especially the first.  (2nd)  You must be prepared for a comrade who would go to bed some part of every day and often stay silent (3rd)  You would have to play the part of a thoughtful courier, sparing me fatigue, looking out that my bed was warmed, etc. (4th)  If you are very nervous, you must recollect a bad hæmorrhage is always on the cards, with its concomitants of anxiety and horror for those who are beside me.

Do you blench?  If so, let us say no more about it.

If you are still unafraid, and the money were forthcoming, I believe the trip might do me good, and I feel sure that, working together, we might produce a fine book.  The Rhone is the river of Angels.  I adore it: have adored it since I was twelve, and first saw it from the train.

Lastly, it would depend on how I keep from now on.  I have stood the winter hitherto with some credit, but the dreadful weather still continues, and I cannot holloa till I am through the wood.

Subject to these numerous and gloomy provisos, I embrace the prospect with glorious feelings.

p. 23I write this from bed, snow pouring without, and no circumstance of pleasure except your letter.  That, however, counts for much.  I am glad you liked the doggerel: I have already had a liberal cheque, over which I licked my fingers with a sound conscience.  I had not meant to make money by these stumbling feet, but if it comes, it is only too welcome in my handsome but impecunious house.

Let me know soon what is to be expected—as far as it does not hang by that inconstant quantity, my want of health.  Remember me to Madam with the best thanks and wishes; and believe me your friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—I try to tell myself it is good nature, but I know it is vanity that makes me write.

I have drafted the first part of Chapter VI., Fleeming and his friends, his influence on me, his views on religion and literature, his part at the Savile; it should boil down to about ten pages, and I really do think it admirably good.  It has so much evoked Fleeming for myself that I found my conscience stirred just as it used to be after a serious talk with him: surely that means it is good?  I had to write and tell you, being alone.

I have excellent news of Fanny, who is much better for the change.  My father is still very yellow, and very old, and very weak, but yesterday he seemed happier, and smiled, and followed what was said; even laughed, I think.  When he came away, he said to me, ‘Take care of yourself, my dearie,’ which had a strange sound of childish days, and will not leave my mind.

You must get Litolf’s Gavottes Célèbres: I have made another trover there: a musette of Lully’s.  The second part of it I have not yet got the hang of; but the first—p. 24only a few bars!  The gavotte is beautiful and pretty hard, I think, and very much of the period; and at the end of it, this musette enters with the most really thrilling effect of simple beauty.  O—it’s first-rate.  I am quite mad over it.  If you find other books containing Lully, Rameau, Martini, please let me know; also you might tell me, you who know Bach, where the easiest is to be found.  I write all morning, come down, and never leave the piano till about five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano till I go to bed.  This is a fine life.—Yours most sincerely,

R. L. S.

If you get the musette (Lully’s), please tell me if I am right, and it was probably written for strings.  Anyway, it is as neat as—as neat as Bach—on the piano; or seems so to my ignorance.

I play much of the Rigadoon but it is strange, it don’t come off quite so well with me!

There is the first part of the musette copied (from memory, so I hope there’s nothing wrong).  Is it not angelic?  But it ought, of course, to have the gavotte before.  The gavotte is in G, and ends on the keynote thus (if I remember):—

staccato, I think.  Then you sail into the musette.

N.B.—Where I have put an ‘A,’ is that a dominant p. 25eleventh, or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed?  It sounds very funny.  Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity), I have always to babble questions: all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever.  The whole piece is marked allegro; but surely could easily be played too fast?  The dignity must not be lost; the periwig feeling.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886.]

MY DEAR FATHER,—The David problem has to-day been decided.  I am to leave the door open for a sequel if the public take to it, and this will save me from butchering a lot of good material to no purpose.  Your letter from Carlisle was pretty like yourself, sir, as I was pleased to see; the hand of Jekyll, not the hand of Hyde.  I am for action quite unfit, and even a letter is beyond me; so pray take these scraps at a vast deal more than their intrinsic worth.  I am in great spirits about David, Colvin agreeing with Henley, Fanny, and myself in thinking it far the most human of my labours hitherto.  As to whether the long-eared British public may take to it, all think it more than doubtful; I wish they would, for I could do a second volume with ease and pleasure, and Colvin thinks it sin and folly to throw away David and Alan Breck upon so small a field as this one.—Ever your affectionate son,

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], April 15 or 16 (the hour not being known), 1886.

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—It is I know not what hour of the night; but I cannot sleep, have lit the gas, and here goes.

First, all your packet arrived: I have dipped into the Schumann already with great pleasure.  Surely, in what concerns us there is a sweet little chirrup; the Good Words arrived in the morning just when I needed it, and the famous notes that I had lost were recovered also in the nick of time.

And now I am going to bother you with my affairs: premising, first, that this is private; second, that whatever I do the Life shall be done first, and I am getting on with it well; and third, that I do not quite know why I consult you, but something tells me you will hear with fairness.

Here is my problem.  The Curtin women are still miserable prisoners; no one dare buy their farm of them, all the manhood of England and the world stands aghast before a threat of murder.  (1) Now, my work can be done anywhere; hence I can take up without loss a back-going Irish farm, and live on, though not (as I had originally written) in it: First Reason.  (2) If I should be killed, there are a good many who would feel it: writers are so much in the public eye, that a writer being murdered would attract attention, throw a bull’s-eye light upon this cowardly business: Second Reason.  (3) I am not unknown in the States, from which the funds come that pay for these brutalities: to some faint extent, my p. 27death (if I should be killed) would tell there: Third Reason.  (4) Nobody else is taking up this obvious and crying duly: Fourth Reason.  (5) I have a crazy health and may die at any moment, my life is of no purchase in an insurance office, it is the less account to husband it, and the business of husbanding a life is dreary and demoralising: Fifth Reason.

I state these in no order, but as they occur to me.  And I shall do the like with the objections.

First Objection: It will do no good; you have seen Gordon die and nobody minded; nobody will mind if you die.  This is plainly of the devil.  Second Objection: You will not even be murdered, the climate will miserably kill you, you will strangle out in a rotten damp heat, in congestion, etc.  Well, what then?  It changes nothing: the purpose is to brave crime; let me brave it, for such time and to such an extent as God allows.  Third Objection: The Curtin women are probably highly uninteresting females.  I haven’t a doubt of it.  But the Government cannot, men will not, protect them.  If I am the only one to see this public duty, it is to the public and the Right I should perform it—not to Mesdames Curtin.  Fourth Objection: I am married.  ‘I have married a wife!’  I seem to have heard it before.  It smells ancient! what was the context?  Fifth Objection: My wife has had a mean life (1), loves me (2), could not bear to lose me (3).  (1) I admit: I am sorry.  (2) But what does she love me for? and (3) she must lose me soon or late.  And after all, because we run this risk, it does not follow we should fail.  Sixth Objection: My wife wouldn’t like it.  No, she wouldn’t.  Who would?  But the Curtins don’t like it.  And all those who are to suffer if this goes on, won’t like it.  And if there is a great wrong, somebody must suffer.  Seventh Objection: I won’t like it.  No, I will not; I have thought it through, and I will not.  But what of that?  And both she and I may like it more than we suppose.  We shall lose friends, all comforts, p. 28all society: so has everybody who has ever done anything; but we shall have some excitement, and that’s a fine thing; and we shall be trying to do the right, and that’s not to be despised.  Eighth Objection: I am an author with my work before me.  See Second Reason.  Ninth Objection: But am I not taken with the hope of excitement?  I was at first.  I am not much now.  I see what a dreary, friendless, miserable, God-forgotten business it will be.  And anyway, is not excitement the proper reward of doing anything both right and a little dangerous?  Tenth Objection: But am I not taken with a notion of glory?  I dare say I am.  Yet I see quite clearly how all points to nothing coming, to a quite inglorious death by disease and from the lack of attendance; or even if I should be knocked on the head, as these poor Irish promise, how little any one will care.  It will be a smile at a thousand breakfast-tables.  I am nearly forty now; I have not many illusions.  And if I had?  I do not love this health-tending, housekeeping life of mine.  I have a taste for danger, which is human, like the fear of it.  Here is a fair cause; a just cause; no knight ever set lance in rest for a juster.  Yet it needs not the strength I have not, only the passive courage that I hope I could muster, and the watchfulness that I am sure I could learn.

Here is a long midnight dissertation; with myself; with you.  Please let me hear.  But I charge you this: if you see in this idea of mine the finger of duty, do not dissuade me.  I am nearing forty, I begin to love my ease and my home and my habits, I never knew how much till this arose; do not falsely counsel me to put my head under the bed-clothes.  And I will say this to you: my wife, who hates the idea, does not refuse.  ‘It is nonsense,’ says she, ‘but if you go, I will go.’  Poor girl, and her home and her garden that she was so proud of!  I feel her garden most of all, because it is a pleasure (I suppose) that I do not feel myself to share.

p. 291.  Here is a great wrong.

2.  ,, growing wrong.

3.  ,, wrong founded on crime.

4.  ,, crime that the Government cannot prevent.

5.  ,, crime that it occurs to no man to defy.

6.  But it has occurred to me.

7.  Being a known person, some will notice my defiance.

8.  Being a writer, I can make people notice it.

9.  And, I think, make people imitate me.

10.  Which would destroy in time this whole scaffolding of oppression.

11.  And if I fail, however ignominiously, that is not my concern.  It is, with an odd mixture of reverence and humorous remembrances of Dickens, be it said—it is A-nother’s.

And here, at I cannot think what hour of the morning, I shall dry up, and remain,—Yours, really in want of a little help,

R. L S.

Next morning.—Eleventh Objection: I have a father and mother.  And who has not?  Macduff’s was a rare case; if we must wait for a Macduff.  Besides, my father will not perhaps be long here.  Twelfth Objection: The cause of England in Ireland is not worth supporting.  À qui le dites-vous?  And I am not supporting that.  Home Rule, if you like.  Cause of decency, the idea that populations should not be taught to gain public ends by private crime, the idea that for all men to bow before a threat of crime is to loosen and degrade beyond redemption the whole fabric of man’s decency.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—The Book—It is all drafted: I hope soon to send you for comments Chapters III., IV., and V.  Chapter VII. is roughly but satisfactorily drafted: a very little work should put that to rights.  But Chapter VI. is no joke; it is a mare magnum: I swim and drown and come up again; and it is all broken ends and mystification: moreover, I perceive I am in want of more matter.  I must have, first of all, a little letter from Mr. Ewing about the phonograph work: If you think he would understand it is quite a matter of chance whether I use a word or a fact out of it.  If you think he would not: I will go without.  Also, could I have a look at Ewing’s précis?  And lastly, I perceive I must interview you again about a few points; they are very few, and might come to little; and I propose to go on getting things as well together as I can in the meanwhile, and rather have a final time when all is ready and only to be criticised.  I do still think it will be good.  I wonder if Trélat would let me cut?  But no, I think I wouldn’t after all; ’tis so quaint and pretty and clever and simple and French, and gives such a good sight of Fleeming: the plum of the book, I think.

You misunderstood me in one point: I always hoped to found such a society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire success.  But—I cannot play Peter the Hermit.  In these days of the Fleet Street journalist, I cannot send out better men than myself, with p. 31wives or mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I may at least say) better, to a danger and a long-drawn dreariness that I do not share.  My wife says it’s cowardice; what brave men are the leader-writers!  Call it cowardice; it is mine.  Mind you, I may end by trying to do it by the pen only: I shall not love myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do a thing for which you despise yourself?—even in the doing?  And if the thing you do is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect?  I have never dared to say what I feel about men’s lives, because my own was in the wrong: shall I dare to send them to death?  The physician must heal himself; he must honestly try the path he recommends: if he does not even try, should he not be silent?

I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness you brought to it.  You know, I think when a serious thing is your own, you keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go.  So I do not write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened gravity I feel.  And indeed, what with the book, and this business to which I referred, and Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable state.  Well, I ought to be glad, after ten years of the worst training on earth—valetudinarianism—that I can still be troubled by a duty.  You shall hear more in time; so far, I am at least decided: I will go and see Balfour when I get to London.

We have all had a great pleasure: a Mrs. Rawlinson came and brought with her a nineteen-year-old daughter, simple, human, as beautiful as—herself; I never admired a girl before, you know it was my weakness: we are all three dead in love with her.  How nice to be able to do so much good to harassed people by—yourself!  Ever yours,

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886.]

Of the many flowers you brought me,
   Only some were meant to stay,
And the flower I thought the sweetest
   Was the flower that went away.

Of the many flowers you brought me,
   All were fair and fresh and gay,
But the flower I thought the sweetest
   Was the blossom of the May.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, May 25th, 1886.

DEAR MISS MONROE,—(I hope I have this rightly) I must lose no time in thanking you for a letter singularly pleasant to receive.  It may interest you to know that I read to the signature without suspecting my correspondent was a woman; though in one point (a reference to the Countess) I might have found a hint of the truth.  You are not pleased with Otto; since I judge you do not like weakness; and no more do I.  And yet I have more than tolerance for Otto, whose faults are the faults of weakness, but never of ignoble weakness, and who seeks before all to be both kind and just.  Seeks, not succeeds.  But what is man?  So much of cynicism to recognise that nobody does right is the best equipment for those who do not wish to be cynics in good earnest.  Think better of Otto, if my plea can influence you; and this I mean for your own sake—not his, poor fellow, as he will never learn your opinion; but for yours, because, as p. 33men go in this world (and women too), you will not go far wrong if you light upon so fine a fellow; and to light upon one and not perceive his merits is a calamity.  In the flesh, of course, I mean; in the book the fault, of course, is with my stumbling pen.  Seraphina made a mistake about her Otto; it begins to swim before me dimly that you may have some traits of Seraphina?

With true ingratitude you see me pitch upon your exception; but it is easier to defend oneself gracefully than to acknowledge praise.  I am truly glad that you should like my books; for I think I see from what you write that you are a reader worth convincing.  Your name, if I have properly deciphered it, suggests that you may be also something of my countrywoman; for it is hard to see where Monroe came from, if not from Scotland.  I seem to have here a double claim on your good nature: being myself pure Scotch and having appreciated your letter, make up two undeniable merits which, perhaps, if it should be quite without trouble, you might reward with your photograph.—Yours truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886.]

MY DEAR MISS MONROE,—I am ill in bed and stupid, incoherently stupid; yet I have to answer your letter, and if the answer is incomprehensible you must forgive me.  You say my letter caused you pleasure; I am sure, as it fell out, not near so much as yours has brought to me.  The interest taken in an author is fragile: his next book, or your next year of culture, might see the interest frosted or outgrown; and himself, in spite of all, you might probably find the most distasteful person upon earth.  My case is different.  I have bad health, am often condemned p. 34to silence for days together—was so once for six weeks, so that my voice was awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a shadow—have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active and adventurous, and ran in the open air: and being a person who prefers life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in love, or to risk a danger, than to paint the finest picture or write the noblest book, I begin to regard what remains to me of my life as very shadowy.  From a variety of reasons, I am ashamed to confess I was much in this humour when your letter came.  I had a good many troubles; was regretting a high average of sins; had been recently reminded that I had outlived some friends, and wondering if I had not outlived some friendships; and had just, while boasting of better health, been struck down again by my haunting enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly irksome.  Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the elderly this sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather aching sense of the past and the future?  Well, it was just then that your letter and your photograph were brought to me in bed; and there came to me at once the most agreeable sense of triumph.  My books were still young; my words had their good health and could go about the world and make themselves welcome; and even (in a shadowy and distant sense) make something in the nature of friends for the sheer hulk that stays at home and bites his pen over the manuscripts.  It amused me very much to remember that I had been in Chicago, not so many years ago, in my proper person; where I had failed to awaken much remark, except from the ticket collector; and to think how much more gallant and persuasive were the fellows that I now send instead of me, and how these are welcome in that quarter to the sitter of Herr Platz, while their author was not very welcome even in the villainous restaurant where he tried to eat a meal and rather failed.

p. 35And this leads me directly to a confession.  The photograph which shall accompany this is not chosen as the most like, but the best-looking.  Put yourself in my place, and you will call this pardonable.  Even as it is, even putting forth a flattered presentment, I am a little pained; and very glad it is a photograph and not myself that has to go; for in this case, if it please you, you can tell yourself it is my image—and if it displeased you, you can lay the blame on the photographer; but in that, there were no help, and the poor author might belie his labours.

Kidnapped should soon appear; I am afraid you may not like it, as it is very unlike Prince Otto in every way; but I am myself a great admirer of the two chief characters, Alan and David.  Virginibus Puerisque has never been issued in the States.  I do not think it is a book that has much charm for publishers in any land; but I am to bring out a new edition in England shortly, a copy of which I must try to remember to send you.  I say try to remember, because I have some superficial acquaintance with myself: and I have determined, after a galling discipline, to promise nothing more until the day of my death: at least, in this way, I shall no more break my word, and I must now try being churlish instead of being false.

I do not believe you to be the least like Seraphina.  Your photograph has no trace of her, which somewhat relieves me, as I am a good deal afraid of Seraphinas—they do not always go into the woods and see the sunrise, and some are so well-mailed that even that experience would leave them unaffected and unsoftened.  The ‘hair and eyes of several complexions’ was a trait taken from myself; and I do not bind myself to the opinions of Sir John.  In this case, perhaps—but no, if the peculiarity is shared by two such pleasant persons as you and I (as you and me—the grammatical nut is hard), it must be a very good thing indeed, and Sir John must be an ass.

p. 36The Book Reader notice was a strange jumble of fact and fancy.  I wish you could have seen my father’s old assistant and present partner when he heard my father described as an ‘inspector of lighthouses,’ for we are all very proud of the family achievements, and the name of my house here in Bournemouth is stolen from one of the sea-towers of the Hebrides which are our pyramids and monuments.  I was never at Cambridge, again; but neglected a considerable succession of classes at Edinburgh.  But to correct that friendly blunderer were to write an autobiography.—And so now, with many thanks, believe me yours sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886.

SIR,—Your foolish letter was unduly received.  There may be hidden fifths, and if there are, it shows how dam spontaneous the thing was.  I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody, which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ.  If your heart (which was what I addressed) remained unmoved, let us refer to the affair no more: crystallised emotion, the statement and the reconciliation of the sorrows of the race and the individual, is obviously no more to you than supping sawdust.  Well, well.  If ever I write another Threnody!  My next op. will probably be a Passepied and fugue in G (or D).

p. 37The mind is in my case shrunk to the size and sp. gr. of an aged Spanish filbert.  O, I am so jolly silly.  I now pickle with some freedom (1) the refrain of Martini’s Moutons; (2) Sul margine d’un rio, arranged for the infant school by the Aged Statesman; (3) the first phrase of Bach’s musette (Sweet Englishwoman, No. 3), [37] the rest of the musette being one prolonged cropper, which I take daily for the benefit of my health.  All my other works (of which there are many) are either arranged (by R. L. Stevenson) for the manly and melodious forefinger, or else prolonged and melancholy croppers. . . . I find one can get a notion of music very nicely.  I have been pickling deeply in the Magic Flute; and have arranged La dove prende, almost to the end, for two melodious forefingers.  I am next going to score the really nobler Colomba o tortorella for the same instruments.

This day is published
The works of Ludwig van Beethoven
arranged
and wiederdurchgearbeiteted
for two melodious forefingers
by,
Sir,—Your obedient servant,

Pimperly Stipple.

That’s a good idea?  There’s a person called Lenz who actually does it—beware his den; I lost eighteenpennies on him, and found the bleeding corpses of pieces of music divorced from their keys, despoiled of their graces, and even changed in time; I do not wish to regard music (nor to be regarded) through that bony Lenz.  You say you are ‘a spumfed idiot’; but how about Lenz?  And how about me, sir, me?

I yesterday sent Lloyd by parcel post, at great expense, an empty matchbox and empty cigarette-paper book, a bell from a cat’s collar, an iron kitchen spoon, and a piece p. 38of coal more than half the superficies of this sheet of paper.  They are now (appropriately enough) speeding towards the Silly Isles; I hope he will find them useful.  By that, and my telegram with prepaid answer to yourself, you may judge of my spiritual state.  The finances have much brightened; and if Kidnapped keeps on as it has begun, I may be solvent.—Yours,

Threnodiæ Avctor
(The authour of ane Threnodie).

Op. 2: Scherzo (in G Major) expressive of the Sense of favours to come.

Skerryvore [Bournemouth, July 1886].

DEAR BOB,—Herewith another shy; more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic.  The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair.  Bar the dam bareness of the base, it looks like a piece of real music from a distance.  I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time; the base was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, sir, and may God have mercy on their souls!—Yours,

The Maestro.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 7th, 1886.

MY DEAR PEOPLE,—It is probably my fault, and not yours, that I did not understand.  I think it would be p. 39well worth trying the winter in Bournemouth; but I would only take the house by the month—this after mature discussion.  My leakage still pursues its course; if I were only well, I have a notion to go north and get in (if I could) at the inn at Kirkmichael, which has always smiled upon me much.  If I did well there, we might then meet and do what should most smile at the time.

Meanwhile, of course, I must not move, and am in a rancid box here, feeling the heat a great deal, and pretty tired of things.  Alexander did a good thing of me at last; it looks like a mixture of an aztec idol, a lion, an Indian Rajah, and a woman; and certainly represents a mighty comic figure.  F. and Lloyd both think it is the best thing that has been done of me up to now.

You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle, and me on the piano!  Dear powers, what a concerto!  I now live entirely for the piano, he for the whistle; the neighbours, in a radius of a furlong and a half, are packing up in quest of brighter climes.—Ever yours,

R. L. S.

P.S.—Please say if you can afford to let us have money for this trip, and if so, how much.  I can see the year through without help, I believe, and supposing my health to keep up; but can scarce make this change on my own metal.

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886].

DEAR CHARLES,—Doubtless, if all goes well, towards the 1st of August we shall be begging at your door.  Thanks for a sight of the papers, which I return (you see) at once, fearing further responsibility.

Glad you like Dauvit; but eh, man, yon’s terrible strange conduc’ o’ thon man Rankeillor.  Ca’ him a legal p. 40adviser!  It would make a bonny law-shuit, the Shaws case; and yon paper they signed, I’m thinking, wouldnae be muckle thought o’ by Puggy Deas.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], July 28, 1886.

MY DEAR FATHER,—We have decided not to come to Scotland, but just to do as Dobell wished, and take an outing.  I believe this is wiser in all ways; but I own it is a disappointment.  I am weary of England; like Alan, ‘I weary for the heather,’ if not for the deer.  Lloyd has gone to Scilly with Katharine and C., where and with whom he should have a good time.  David seems really to be going to succeed, which is a pleasant prospect on all sides.  I am, I believe, floated financially; a book that sells will be a pleasant novelty.  I enclose another review; mighty complimentary, and calculated to sell the book too.

Coolin’s tombstone has been got out, honest man! and it is to be polished, for it has got scratched, and have a touch of gilding in the letters, and be sunk in the front of the house.  Worthy man, he, too, will maybe weary for the heather, and the bents of Gullane, where (as I dare say you remember) he gaed clean gyte, and jumped on to his crown from a gig, in hot and hopeless chase of many thousand rabbits.  I can still hear the little cries of the honest fellow as he disappeared; and my mother will correct me, but I believe it was two days before he turned up again at North Berwick: to judge by his belly, he had caught not one out of these thousands, but he had had some exercise.

I keep well.—Ever your affectionate son,

R. L. S.

British Museum [August 10th, 1886].

MY DEAR MOTHER,—We are having a capital holiday, and I am much better, and enjoying myself to the nines.  Richmond is painting my portrait.  To-day I lunch with him, and meet Burne-Jones; to-night Browning dines with us.  That sounds rather lofty work, does it not?  His path was paved with celebrities.  To-morrow we leave for Paris, and next week, I suppose, or the week after, come home.  Address here, as we may not reach Paris.  I am really very well.—Ever your affectionate son,

R. L. S.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth [September 1886].

DEAR MR. WATTS, The sight of the last Athenæum reminds me of you, and of my debt, now too long due.  I wish to thank you for your notice of Kidnapped; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I valued it, but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers.  A critic like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in vain.

What you say of the two parts in Kidnapped was felt by no one more painfully than by myself.  I began it partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it p. 42moved, David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world.  But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door.  So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay.  For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist’s proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very hard.  Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my Kidnapped was doomed, while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the thing it is.

And now to the more genial business of defence.  You attack my fight on board the Covenant: I think it literal.  David and Alan had every advantage on their side—position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the round-house by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out.  The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.—I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, September 4, 1886.

Not roses to the rose, I trow,
   The thistle sends, nor to the bee
Do wasps bring honey.  Wherefore now
   Should Locker ask a verse from me?

Martial, perchance,—but he is dead,
   And Herrick now must rhyme no more;
Still burning with the muse, they tread
   (And arm in arm) the shadowy shore.

They, if they lived, with dainty hand,
   To music as of mountain brooks,
Might bring you worthy words to stand
   Unshamed, dear Locker, in your books.

But tho’ these fathers of your race
   Be gone before, yourself a sire,
To-day you see before your face
   Your stalwart youngsters touch the lyre—

On these—on Lang, or Dobson—call,
   Long leaders of the songful feast.
They lend a verse your laughing fall—
   A verse they owe you at the least.

[Skerryvore], Bournemouth, September 1886.

DEAR LOCKER,—You take my verses too kindly, but you will admit, for such a bluebottle of a versifier to enter the house of Gertrude, where her necklace hangs, was not a little brave.  Your kind invitation, I fear, must remain unaccented; and yet—if I am very well—perhaps next spring—(for I mean to be very well)—my wife might. . . .  But all that is in the clouds with my better health.  And now look here: you are a rich man and know many people, therefore perhaps some of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital.  If you do, I know a most deserving case, in which I would (if I could) do anything.  To approach you, in this way, is not decent; and you may therefore judge by my doing it, how near this matter lies to my heart.  I enclose you a list of the Governors, which I beg you to return, whether or not you shall be able to do anything to help me.

The boy’s name is —; he and his mother are very poor.  It may interest you in her cause if I tell you this: that when I was dangerously ill at Hyères, this brave lady, who had then a sick husband of her own (since dead) and a house to keep and a family of four to cook for, all with her own hands, for they could afford no servant, yet took watch-about with my wife, and contributed not only to my comfort, but to my recovery in a degree that I am not able to limit.  You can conceive how much I suffer from my impotence to help her, and indeed I have already shown myself a thankless friend.  Let not my cry go up before you in vain!—Yours in hope,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886.

MY DEAR LOCKER,—That I should call myself a man of letters, and land myself in such unfathomable ambiguities!  No, my dear Locker, I did not want a cheque; and in my ignorance of business, which is greater even than my ignorance of literature, I have taken the liberty of drawing a pen through the document and returning it; should this be against the laws of God or man, forgive me.  All that I meant by my excessively disgusting reference to your material well-being was the vague notion that a man who is well off was sure to know a Governor of Christ’s Hospital; though how I quite arrived at this conclusion I do not see.  A man with a cold in the head does not necessarily know a ratcatcher; and the connection is equally close—as it now appears to my awakened and somewhat humbled spirit.  For all that, let me thank you in the warmest manner for your friendly readiness to contribute.  You say you have hopes of becoming a miser: I wish I had; but indeed I believe you deceive yourself, and are as far from it as ever.  I wish I had any excuse to keep your cheque, for it is much more elegant to receive than to return; but I have my way of making it up to you, and I do sincerely beg you to write to the two Governors.  This extraordinary outpouring of correspondence would (if you knew my habits) convince you of my great eagerness in this matter.  I would promise gratitude; but I have made a promise to myself to make no more promises to anybody else, having broken such a host already, and come near breaking my heart in consequence; and as for gratitude, I am by nature a thankless dog, and was spoiled from a child up.  But if you can help this lady in the matter of the Hospital, you will have p. 46helped the worthy.  Let me continue to hope that I shall make out my visit in the spring, and believe me, yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

It may amuse you to know that a very long while ago, I broke my heart to try to imitate your verses, and failed hopelessly.  I saw some of the evidences the other day among my papers, and blushed to the heels.

R. L. S.

I give up finding out your name in the meantime, and keep to that by which you will be known—Frederick Locker.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], 24th September 1886.

MY DEAR LOCKER,—You are simply an angel of light, and your two letters have gone to the post; I trust they will reach the hearts of the recipients—at least, that could not be more handsomely expressed.  About the cheque: well now, I am going to keep it; but I assure you Mrs. — has never asked me for money, and I would not dare to offer any till she did.  For all that I shall stick to the cheque now, and act to that amount as your almoner.  In this way I reward myself for the ambiguity of my epistolary style.

I suppose, if you please, you may say your verses are thin (would you so describe an arrow, by the way, and one that struck the gold?  It scarce strikes me as exhaustively descriptive), and, thin or not, they are (and I have found them) inimitably elegant.  I thank you again very sincerely for the generous trouble you have taken in this matter which was so near my heart, and you may be very certain it will be the fault of my health and not my inclination, if I do not see you before very long; for all that has past has made me in more than the official sense sincerely yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Skerryvore, Dec. 14, 1886.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—This is first-rate of you, the Lord love you for it!  I am truly much obliged.  He—my father—is very changeable; at times, he seems only a slow quiet edition of himself; again, he will be very heavy and blank; but never so violent as last spring; and therefore, to my mind, better on the whole.

Fanny is pretty peepy; I am splendid.  I have been writing much verse—quite the bard, in fact; and also a dam tale to order, which will be what it will be: I don’t love it, but some of it is passable in its mouldy way, The Misadventures of John Nicholson.  All my bardly exercises are in Scotch; I have struck my somewhat ponderous guitar in that tongue to no small extent: with what success, I know not, but I think it’s better than my English verse; more marrow and fatness, and more ruggedness.

How goes Keats?  Pray remark, if he (Keats) hung back from Shelley, it was not to be wondered at, when so many of his friends were Shelley’s pensioners.  I forget if you have made this point; it has been borne in upon me reading Dowden and the Shelley Papers; and it will do no harm if you have made it.  I finished a poem to-day, and writ 3000 words of a story, tant bien que mal; and have a right to be sleepy, and (what is far nobler and rarer) am so.—My dear Colvin, ever yours,

The Real Mackay.

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 5th, 1887.

MY DEAR LOCKER,—Here I am in my bed as usual, and it is indeed a long while since I went out to dinner.  You do not know what a crazy fellow this is.  My winter has not so far been luckily passed, and all hope of paying visits at Easter has vanished for twelve calendar months.  But because I am a beastly and indurated invalid, I am not dead to human feelings; and I neither have forgotten you nor will forget you.  Some day the wind may round to the right quarter and we may meet; till then I am still truly yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 1887.]

MY DEAR JAMES,—My health has played me it in once more in the absurdest fashion, and the creature who now addresses you is but a stringy and white-faced bouilli out of the pot of fever, with the devil to pay in every corner of his economy.  I suppose (to judge by your letter) I need not send you these sheets, which came during my collapse by the rush.  I am on the start with three volumes, that one of tales, [48a] a second one of essays, [48b] and one of—ahem—verse. [48c]  This is a great order, is it not?  After that I shall have empty lockers.  All new work stands still; I was getting on well with Jenkin when this blessed malady unhorsed me, and sent me back to the dung-collecting trade of the republisher.  I shall re-issue p. 49Virg. Puer. as Vol. I. of Essays, and the new vol. as Vol. II. of ditto; to be sold, however, separately.  This is but a dry maundering; however, I am quite unfit—‘I am for action quite unfit Either of exercise or wit.’  My father is in a variable state; many sorrows and perplexities environ the house of Stevenson; my mother shoots north at this hour on business of a distinctly rancid character; my father (under my wife’s tutorage) proceeds to-morrow to Salisbury; I remain here in my bed and whistle; in no quarter of heaven is anything encouraging apparent, except that the good Colvin comes to the hotel here on a visit.  This dreary view of life is somewhat blackened by the fact that my head aches, which I always regard as a liberty on the part of the powers that be.  This is also my first letter since my recovery.  God speed your laudatory pen!

My wife joins in all warm messages.—Yours,

R. L. S.

(April 1887.)

MY DEAR LOW,—The fares to London may be found in any continental Bradshaw or sich; from London to Bournemouth impoverished parties who can stoop to the third class get their ticket for the matter of 10s., or, as my wife loves to phrase it, ‘a half a pound.’  You will also be involved in a 3s. fare to get to Skerryvore; but this, I dare say, friends could help you in on your arrival; so that you may reserve your energies for the two tickets—costing the matter of a pound—and the usual gratuities to porters.  This does not seem to me much: considering the intellectual pleasures that await you here, I call it dirt cheap.  I believe the third class from Paris to London p. 50(viâ Dover) is about forty francs, but I cannot swear.  Suppose it to be fifty.

if there be any arithmetical virtue in me.  I have left out dinner in London in case you want to blow out, which would come extry, and with the aid of vangs fangs might easily double the whole amount—above all if you have a few friends to meet you.

In making this valuable project, or budget, I discovered for the first time a reason (frequently overlooked) for the singular costliness of travelling with your wife.  Anybody would count the tickets double; but how few would have remembered—or indeed has any one ever remembered?—to count the spontaneous lapse of coin double also?  Yet there are two of you, each must do his daily leakage, and it must be done out of your travelling fund.  You will tell me, perhaps, that you carry the coin yourself: my dear sir, do you think you can fool your Maker?  Your wife has to lose her quota; and by God she will—if you kept the p. 51coin in a belt.  One thing I have omitted: you will lose a certain amount on the exchange, but this even I cannot foresee, as it is one of the few things that vary with the way a man has.—I am, dear sir, yours financially,

Samuel Budgett.

Skerryvore, April 16th, 1887.

MY DEAREST CUMMY,—As usual, I have been a dreary bad fellow and not written for ages; but you must just try to forgive me, to believe (what is the truth) that the number of my letters is no measure of the number of times I think of you, and to remember how much writing I have to do.  The weather is bright, but still cold; and my father, I’m afraid, feels it sharply.  He has had—still has, rather—a most obstinate jaundice, which has reduced him cruelly in strength, and really upset him altogether.  I hope, or think, he is perhaps a little better; but he suffers much, cannot sleep at night, and gives John and my mother a severe life of it to wait upon him.  My wife is, I think, a little better, but no great shakes.  I keep mightily respectable myself.

Coolin’s Tombstone is now built into the front wall of Skerryvore, and poor Bogie’s (with a Latin inscription also) is set just above it.  Poor, unhappy wee man, he died, as you must have heard, in fight, which was what he would have chosen; for military glory was more in his line than the domestic virtues.  I believe this is about all my news, except that, as I write, there is a blackbird singing in our garden trees, as it were at Swanston.  I would like fine to go up the burnside a bit, and sit by the pool and be young again—or no, be what I am still, only there instead of here, for just a little.  Did you see that I had written about John Todd?  In this month’s Longman it was; if you have not seen it, I will try and send it you.  Some day climb as high as p. 52Halkerside for me (I am never likely to do it for myself), and sprinkle some of the well water on the turf.  I am afraid it is a pagan rite, but quite harmless, and ye can sain it wi’ a bit prayer.  Tell the Peewies that I mind their forbears well.  My heart is sometimes heavy, and sometimes glad to mind it all.  But for what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful.  Don’t forget to sprinkle the water, and do it in my name; I feel a childish eagerness in this.

Remember me most kindly to James, and with all sorts of love to yourself, believe me, your laddie,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—I suppose Mrs. Todd ought to see the paper about her man; judge of that, and if you think she would not dislike it, buy her one from me, and let me know.  The article is called ‘Pastoral,’ in Longman’s Magazine for April.  I will send you the money; I would to-day, but it’s the Sabbie day, and I cannae.

R. L. S.

Remembrances from all here.

[Edinburgh, June 1887.]

MY DEAR S. C.,—At last I can write a word to you.  Your little note in the P. M. G. was charming.  I have written four pages in the Contemporary, which Bunting found room for: they are not very good, but I shall do more for his memory in time.

About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad.  If we could have had my father, p. 53that would have been a different thing.  But to keep that changeling—suffering changeling—any longer, could better none and nothing.  Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself.  He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him.

My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene—‘O let him pass,’ Kent and Lear—was played for me here in the first moment of my return.  I believe Shakespeare saw it with his own father.  I had no words; but it was shocking to see.  He died on his feet, you know; was on his feet the last day, knowing nobody—still he would be up.  This was his constant wish; also that he might smoke a pipe on his last day.  The funeral would have pleased him; it was the largest private funeral in man’s memory here.

We have no plans, and it is possible we may go home without going through town.  I do not know; I have no views yet whatever; nor can have any at this stage of my cold and my business.—Ever yours,

R. L. S.

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], August 1887.

DEAR LAD,—I write to inform you that Mr. Stevenson’s well-known work, Virginibus Puerisque, is about to be reprinted.  At the same time a second volume called Memories and Portraits will issue from the roaring loom.  Its interest will be largely autobiographical, Mr. S. having sketched there the lineaments of many departed friends, and dwelt fondly, and with a m’istened eye, upon byegone pleasures.  The two will be issued under the common title of Familiar Essays; but the volumes will be vended separately to those who are mean enough not to hawk at both.

p. 60The blood is at last stopped: only yesterday.  I began to think I should not get away.  However, I hope—I hope—remark the word—no boasting—I hope I may luff up a bit now.  Dobell, whom I saw, gave as usual a good account of my lungs, and expressed himself, like his neighbours, hopefully about the trip.  He says, my uncle says, Scott says, Brown says—they all say—You ought not to be in such a state of health; you should recover.  Well, then, I mean to.  My spirits are rising again after three months of black depression: I almost begin to feel as if I should care to live: I would, by God!  And so I believe I shall.—Yours,

Bulletin M‘Gurder.

How has the Deacon gone?

[Skerryvore, Bournemouth], August 6th, 1887.

MY DEAR LOW,—We—my mother, my wife, my stepson, my maidservant, and myself, five souls—leave, if all is well, Aug. 20th, per Wilson line SS. Ludgate Hill.  Shall probably evade N. Y. at first, cutting straight to a watering-place: Newport, I believe, its name.  Afterwards we shall steal incognito into la bonne villa, and see no one but you and the Scribners, if it may be so managed.  You must understand I have been very seedy indeed, quite a dead body; and unless the voyage does miracles, I shall have to draw it dam fine.  Alas, ‘The Canoe Speaks’ is now out of date; it will figure in my volume of verses now imminent.  However, I may find some inspiration some day.—Till very soon, yours ever,

R. L. S.

p. 61Bournemouth, August 19th, 1887.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,—I promise you the paper-knife shall go to sea with me; and if it were in my disposal, I should promise it should return with me too.  All that you say, I thank you for very much; I thank you for all the pleasantness that you have brought about our house; and I hope the day may come when I shall see you again in poor old Skerryvore, now left to the natives of Canada, or to worse barbarians, if such exist.  I am afraid my attempt to jest is rather à contre-cœur.  Good-bye—au revoir—and do not forget your friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Bournemouth [August 1887].

DEAR SIRS,—I here enclose the two titles.  Had you not better send me the bargains to sign?  I shall be here till Saturday; and shall have an address in London (which I shall send you) till Monday, when I shall sail.  Even if the proofs do not reach you till Monday morning, you could send a clerk from Fenchurch Street Station at 10.23 A.M. for Galleons Station, and he would find me embarking on board the Ludgate Hill, Island Berth, Royal Albert Dock.  Pray keep this in case it should be necessary to catch this last chance.  I am most anxious to have the proofs with me on the voyage.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

p. 62H.M.S. ‘Vulgarium,’

Off Havre de Grace, this 22nd day of August [1887].

SIR,—The weather has been hitherto inimitable.  Inimitable is the only word that I can apply to our fellow-voyagers, whom a categorist, possibly premature, has been already led to divide into two classes—the better sort consisting of the baser kind of Bagman, and the worser of undisguised Beasts of the Field.  The berths are excellent, the pasture swallowable, the champagne of H. James (to recur to my favourite adjective) inimitable.  As for the Commodore, he slept awhile in the evening, tossed off a cup of Henry James with his plain meal, walked the deck till eight, among sands and floating lights and buoys and wrecked brigantines, came down (to his regret) a minute too soon to see Margate lit up, turned in about nine, slept, with some interruptions, but on the whole sweetly, until six, and has already walked a mile or so of deck, among a fleet of other steamers waiting for the tide, within view of Havre, and pleasantly entertained by passing fishing-boats, hovering sea-gulls, and Vulgarians pairing on deck with endearments of primitive simplicity.  There, sir, can be viewed the sham quarrel, the sham desire for information, and every device of these two poor ancient sexes (who might, you might think, have learned in the course of the ages something new) down to the exchange of head-gear.—I am, sir, yours,

Bold Bob Boltsprit.

p. 63B. B. B. (alias the Commodore) will now turn to his proofs.  Havre de Grace is a city of some show.  It is for-ti-fied; and, so far as I can see, is a place of some trade.  It is situ-ated in France, a country of Europe.  You always complain there are no facts in my letters.

R. L. S.

Newport, R. I. U.S.A. [September 1887].

MY DEAR COLVIN,—So long it went excellent well, and I had a time I am glad to have had; really enjoying my life.  There is nothing like being at sea, after all.  And O, why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land?  But on the Banks I caught a cold, and I have not yet got over it.  My reception here was idiotic to the last degree. . . .  It is very silly, and not pleasant, except where humour enters; and I confess the poor interviewer lads pleased me.  They are too good for their trade; avoided anything I asked them to avoid, and were no more vulgar in their reports than they could help.  I liked the lads.

O, it was lovely on our stable-ship, chock full of stallions.  She rolled heartily, rolled some of the fittings out of our state-room, and I think a more dangerous cruise (except that it was summer) it would be hard to imagine.  But we enjoyed it to the masthead, all but Fanny; and even she perhaps a little.  When we got in, we had run out of beer, stout, cocoa, soda-water, water, fresh meat, and (almost) of biscuit.  But it was a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon (for we carried a cargo of apes), whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat.  The passengers improved, and were a very good specimen lot, with no drunkard, no gambling that I saw, and less grumbling and backbiting than one would have asked of poor human nature.  Apes, stallions, cows, matches, hay, p. 64and poor men-folk, all, or almost all, came successfully to land.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Newport, U.S.A., September 1887.]

MY DEAR JAMES,—Here we are at Newport in the house of the good Fairchilds; and a sad burthen we have laid upon their shoulders.  I have been in bed practically ever since I came.  I caught a cold on the Banks after having had the finest time conceivable, and enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our strange floating menagerie: stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the ports at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed.  Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break lose in our state-room, and you have the voyage of the Ludgate Hill.  She arrived in the port of New York, without beer, porter, soda-water, curaçoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we regret her.

My wife is a good deal run down, and I am no great shakes.

America is, as I remarked, a fine place to eat in, and a great place for kindness; but, Lord, what a silly thing is popularity!  I envy the cool obscurity of Skerryvore.  If it even paid, said Meanness! and was abashed at himself.—Yours most sincerely,

R. L S.

[New York: end of September 1887.]

MY DEAR S. C.,—Your delightful letter has just come, and finds me in a New York hotel, waiting the arrival of a sculptor (St. Gaudens) who is making a medallion of yours truly and who is (to boot) one of the handsomest and nicest fellows I have seen.  I caught a cold on the Banks; fog is not for me; nearly died of interviewers and visitors, during twenty-four hours in New York; cut for Newport with Lloyd and Valentine, a journey like fairy-land for the most engaging beauties, one little rocky and pine-shaded cove after another, each with a house and a boat at anchor, so that I left my heart in each and marvelled why American authors had been so unjust to their country; caught another cold on the train; arrived at Newport to go to bed and to grow worse, and to stay in bed until I left again; the Fairchilds proving during this time kindness itself; Mr. Fairchild simply one of the most engaging men in the world, and one of the children, Blair, aet. ten, a great joy and amusement in his solemn adoring attitude to the author of Treasure Island.

Here I was interrupted by the arrival of my sculptor.  I have begged him to make a medallion of himself and give me a copy.  I will not take up the sentence in which I was wandering so long, but begin fresh.  I was ten or twelve days at Newport; then came back convalescent to New York.  Fanny and Lloyd are off to the Adirondacks to see if that will suit; and the rest of us leave Monday (this is Saturday) to follow them up.  I hope we may manage to stay there all winter.  I have a splendid appetite and have on the whole recovered well after a mighty sharp attack.  I am now on a salary of £500 a year for twelve articles in Scribner’s Magazine on what I like; it is more than £500, but I cannot calculate more precisely.  You have no idea how much is made of me p. 66here; I was offered £2000 for a weekly article—eh heh! how is that? but I refused that lucrative job.  The success of Underwoods is gratifying.  You see, the verses are sane; that is their strong point, and it seems it is strong enough to carry them.

A thousand thanks for your grand letter, ever yours,

R. L. S.

New York [September 1887]

MY DEAR LAD,—Herewith verses for Dr. Hake, which please communicate.  I did my best with the interviewers; I don’t know if Lloyd sent you the result; my heart was too sick: you can do nothing with them; and yet—literally sweated with anxiety to please, and took me down in long hand!

I have been quite ill, but go better.  I am being not busted, but medallioned, by St. Gaudens, who is a first-rate, plain, high-minded artist and honest fellow; you would like him down to the ground.  I believe sculptors are fine fellows when they are not demons.  O, I am now a salaried person, £600 a year, [66] to write twelve articles in Scribner’s Magazine; it remains to be seen if it really pays, huge as the sum is, but the slavery may overweigh me.  I hope you will like my answer to Hake, and specially that he will.

Love to all.—Yours affectionately,

R. L. S.
(le salarie).

Saranac Lake, Adirondacks,
New York, U.S.A. [October 1887].

MY DEAR BOB,—The cold [of Colorado] was too rigorous for me; I could not risk the long railway voyage, and the season was too late to risk the Eastern, Cape Hatteras side of the steamer one; so here we stuck and stick.  We have a wooden house on a hill-top, overlooking a river, and a village about a quarter of a mile away, and very wooded hills; the whole scene is very Highland, bar want of heather and the wooden houses.

I have got one good thing of my sea voyage: it is proved the sea agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or so in summer.  Good Lord!  What fun!  Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette.  For these two I will sell my soul.  Except for these I hold that £700 a year is as much as anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the extry coins were for no use, excepting for illness, which damns everything.

I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible.  We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea.  And truly there is nothing else.  I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind—full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow’s behaviour.  My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that.  We took so north a course, that we saw Newfoundland; no one in the ship had ever seen it before.

It was beyond belief to me how she rolled; in seemingly smooth water, the bell striking, the fittings bounding p. 68out of our state-room.  It is worth having lived these last years, partly because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage.  I have been made a lot of here, and it is sometimes pleasant, sometimes the reverse; but I could give it all up, and agree that—was the author of my works, for a good seventy ton schooner and the coins to keep her on.  And to think there are parties with yachts who would make the exchange!  I know a little about fame now; it is no good compared to a yacht; and anyway there is more fame in a yacht, more genuine fame; to cross the Atlantic and come to anchor in Newport (say) with the Union Jack, and go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier, among the holiday yachtsmen—that’s fame, that’s glory, and nobody can take it away; they can’t say your book is bad; you have crossed the Atlantic.  I should do it south by the West Indies, to avoid the damned Banks; and probably come home by steamer, and leave the skipper to bring the yacht home.

Well, if all goes well, we shall maybe sail out of Southampton water some of these days and take a run to Havre, and try the Baltic, or somewhere.

Love to you all.—Ever your afft.,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac Lake, Oct. 8th, 1887.

MY DEAR GOSSE,—I have just read your article twice, with cheers of approving laughter.  I do not believe you ever wrote anything so funny: Tyndall’s ‘shell,’ the passage on the Davos press and its invaluable issues, and that on V. Hugo and Swinburne, are exquisite; so, I say p. 69it more ruefully, is the touch about the doctors.  For the rest, I am very glad you like my verses so well; and the qualities you ascribe to them seem to me well found and well named.  I own to that kind of candour you attribute to me: when I am frankly interested, I suppose I fancy the public will be so too; and when I am moved, I am sure of it.  It has been my luck hitherto to meet with no staggering disillusion.  ‘Before’ and ‘After’ may be two; and yet I believe the habit is now too thoroughly ingrained to be altered.  About the doctors, you were right, that dedication has been the subject of some pleasantries that made me grind, and of your happily touched reproof which made me blush.  And to miscarry in a dedication is an abominable form of book-wreck; I am a good captain, I would rather lose the tent and save my dedication.

I am at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, I suppose for the winter: it seems a first-rate place; we have a house in the eye of many winds, with a view of a piece of running water—Highland, all but the dear hue of peat—and of many hills—Highland also, but for the lack of heather.  Soon the snow will close on us; we are here some twenty miles—twenty-seven, they say, but this I profoundly disbelieve—in the woods; communication by letter is slow and (let me be consistent) aleatory; by telegram is as near as may be impossible.

I had some experience of American appreciation; I liked a little of it, but there is too much; a little of that would go a long way to spoil a man; and I like myself better in the woods.  I am so damned candid and ingenuous (for a cynic), and so much of a ‘cweatu’ of impulse—aw’ (if you remember that admirable Leech), that I begin to shirk any more taffy; I think I begin to like it too well.  But let us trust the Gods; they have a rod in pickle; reverently I doff my trousers, and with screwed eyes await the amari aliquid of the great God Busby.

I thank you for the article in all ways, and remain yours affectionately,

R. L. S.

[Saranac, October 1887.]

SIR,—I have to trouble you with the following paroles bien senties.  We are here at a first-rate place.  ‘Baker’s’ is the name of our house, but we don’t address there; we prefer the tender care of the Post-Office, as more aristocratic (it is no use to telegraph even to the care of the Post-Office who does not give a single damn [70]).  Baker’s has a prophet’s chamber, which the hypercritical might describe as a garret with a hole in the floor: in that garret, sir, I have to trouble you and your wife to come and slumber.  Not now, however: with manly hospitality, I choke off any sudden impulse.  Because first, my wife and my mother are gone (a note for the latter, strongly suspected to be in the hand of your talented wife, now sits silent on the mantel shelf), one to Niagara and t’other to Indianapolis.  Because, second, we are not yet installed.  And because third, I won’t have you till I have a buffalo robe and leggings, lest you should want to paint me as a plain man, which I am not, but a rank Saranacker and wild man of the woods.—Yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac Lake, October 1887.

DEAR ARCHER,—Many thanks for the Wondrous Tale.  It is scarcely a work of genius, as I believe you felt.  Thanks also for your pencillings; though I defend ‘shrew,’ or at least many of the shrews.

We are here (I suppose) for the winter in the Adirondacks, p. 71a hill and forest country on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold, and healthful, or we are the more bitterly deceived.  I believe it will do well for me; but must not boast.

My wife is away to Indiana to see her family; my mother, Lloyd, and I remain here in the cold, which has been exceeding sharp, and the hill air, which is inimitably fine.  We all eat bravely, and sleep well, and make great fires, and get along like one o’clock.

I am now a salaried party; I am a bourgeois now; I am to write a weekly paper for Scribner’s, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence.  The editor is, I believe, to apply to you; for we were talking over likely men, and when I instanced you, he said he had had his eye upon you from the first.  It is worth while, perhaps, to get in tow with the Scribners; they are such thorough gentlefolk in all ways that it is always a pleasure to deal with them.  I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution: well, I would prefer that to dying in my bed; and it would be a godsend to my biographer, if ever I have one.  What are you about?  I hope you are all well and in good case and spirits, as I am now, after a most nefast experience of despondency before I left; but indeed I was quite run down.  Remember me to Mrs. Archer, and give my respects to Tom.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

p. 72[Saranac Lake, October 1887.]
I know not the day; but the month it
is the drear October by the
ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—This is to say First, the voyage was a huge success.  We all enjoyed it (bar my wife) to the ground: sixteen days at sea with a cargo of hay, matches, stallions, and monkeys, and in a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to, and the endless pleasures of the sea—the romance of it, the sport of the scratch dinner and the smashing crockery, the pleasure—an endless pleasure—of balancing to the swell: well, it’s over.

Second, I had a fine time, rather a troubled one, at Newport and New York; saw much of and liked hugely the Fairchilds, St. Gaudens the sculptor, Gilder of the Century—just saw the dear Alexander—saw a lot of my old and admirable friend Will Low, whom I wish you knew and appreciated—was medallioned by St. Gaudens, and at last escaped to

Third, Saranac Lake, where we now are, and which I believe we mean to like and pass the winter at.  Our house—emphatically ‘Baker’s’—is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley—bless the face of running water!—and sees some hills too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones, or else largely qualified with whisky.  As I write, the sun (which has been long a stranger) shines in at my shoulder; from the next room, the bell of Lloyd’s typewriter makes an agreeable music as it patters off (at a rate which astonishes this experienced novelist) the early chapters of a humorous romance; from still further off—the walls of Baker’s are neither ancient nor massive—rumours of Valentine about the kitchen stove come to my ears; of my mother and p. 73Fanny I hear nothing, for the excellent reason that they have gone sparking off, one to Niagara, one to Indianapolis.  People complain that I never give news in my letters.  I have wiped out that reproach.

But now, Fourth, I have seen the article; and it may be from natural partiality, I think it the best you have written.  O—I remember the Gautier, which was an excellent performance; and the Balzac, which was good; and the Daudet, over which I licked my chops; but the R. L. S. is better yet.  It is so humorous, and it hits my little frailties with so neat (and so friendly) a touch; and Alan is the occasion for so much happy talk, and the quarrel is so generously praised.  I read it twice, though it was only some hours in my possession; and Low, who got it for me from the Century, sat up to finish it ere he returned it; and, sir, we were all delighted.  Here is the paper out, nor will anything, not even friendship, not even gratitude for the article, induce me to begin a second sheet; so here with the kindest remembrances and the warmest good wishes, I remain, yours affectionately,

R. L. S.

Saranac, 18th November 1887.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—No likely I’m going to waste a sheet of paper. . . .  I am offered £1600 ($8000) for the American serial rights on my next story!  As you say, times are changed since the Lothian Road.  Well, the Lothian Road was grand fun too; I could take an afternoon of it with great delight.  But I’m awfu’ grand noo, and long may it last!

Remember me to any of the faithful—if there are any left.  I wish I could have a crack with you.—Yours ever affectionately,

R. L. S.

I find I have forgotten more than I remembered of business. . . .  Please let us know (if you know) for how much Skerryvore is let; you will here detect the female mind; p. 74I let it for what I could get; nor shall the possession of this knowledge (which I am happy to have forgot) increase the amount by so much as the shadow of a sixpenny piece; but my females are agog.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Saranac, November 20 or 21, 1887.]

MY DEAR MR. SCRIBNER,—Heaven help me, I am under a curse just now.  I have played fast and loose with what I said to you; and that, I beg you to believe, in the purest innocence of mind.  I told you you should have the power over all my work in this country; and about a fortnight ago, when M’Clure was here, I calmly signed a bargain for the serial publication of a story.  You will scarce believe that I did this in mere oblivion; but I did; and all that I can say is that I will do so no more, and ask you to forgive me.  Please write to me soon as to this.

Will you oblige me by paying in for three articles, as already sent, to my account with John Paton & Co., 52 William Street?  This will be most convenient for us.

The fourth article is nearly done; and I am the more deceived, or it is A Buster.

Now as to the first thing in this letter, I do wish to hear from you soon; and I am prepared to hear any reproach, or (what is harder to hear) any forgiveness; for I have deserved the worst.—Yours sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac, November 1887.

DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,—I enclose corrected proof of Beggars, which seems good.  I mean to make a second sermon, which, if it is about the same length as Pulvis et Umbra, might go in along with it as two sermons, in which case I should call the first ‘The Whole Creation,’ and the second ‘Any Good.’  We shall see; but you might say how you like the notion.

One word: if you have heard from Mr. Scribner of my unhappy oversight in the matter of a story, you will make me ashamed to write to you, and yet I wish to beg you to help me into quieter waters.  The oversight committed—and I do think it was not so bad as Mr. Scribner seems to think it-and discovered, I was in a miserable position.  I need not tell you that my first impulse was to offer to share or to surrender the price agreed upon when it should fall due; and it is almost to my credit that I arranged to refrain.  It is one of these positions from which there is no escape; I cannot undo what I have done.  And I wish to beg you—should Mr. Scribner speak to you in the matter—to try to get him to see this neglect of mine for no worse than it is: unpardonable enough, because a breach of an agreement; but still pardonable, because a piece of sheer carelessness and want of memory, done, God knows, without design and since most sincerely regretted.  I have no memory.  You have seen how I omitted to reserve the American rights in Jekyll: last winter I wrote and demanded, as an increase, a less sum than had already been agreed upon for a story that I gave to Cassell’s.  For once that my forgetfulness has, by a cursed fortune, seemed to gain, instead of lose, me money, it is painful indeed that I should produce so poor an impression on the mind of Mr. Scribner.  But I beg you to believe, and if possible to make him believe, that I am in no degree or sense a faiseur, and that in matters of p. 76business my design, at least, is honest.  Nor (bating bad memory and self-deception) am I untruthful in such affairs.

If Mr. Scribner shall have said nothing to you in the matter, please regard the above as unwritten, and believe me, yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac, November 1887.

DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,—The revise seemed all right, so I did not trouble you with it; indeed, my demand for one was theatrical, to impress that obdurate dog, your reader.  Herewith a third paper: it has been a cruel long time upon the road, but here it is, and not bad at last, I fondly hope.  I was glad you liked the Lantern Bearers; I did, too.  I thought it was a good paper, really contained some excellent sense, and was ingeniously put together.  I have not often had more trouble than I have with these papers; thirty or forty pages of foul copy, twenty is the very least I have had.  Well, you pay high; it is fit that I should have to work hard, it somewhat quiets my conscience.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac Lake, Adirondack Mountains,
New York, U.S.A., November 21, 1887.

MY DEAR SYMONDS,—I think we have both meant and wanted to write to you any time these months; but we have been much tossed about, among new faces and old, and new scenes and old, and scenes (like this of Saranac) which are neither one nor other.  To give you some clue to our affairs, I had best begin pretty well back.  We sailed from the Thames in a vast bucket of iron that took seventeen days from shore to shore.  I cannot describe how I enjoyed the voyage, nor what good it did me; but on the Banks I caught friend catarrh.  In New York and p. 77then in Newport I was pretty ill; but on my return to New York, lying in bed most of the time, with St. Gaudens the sculptor sculping me, and my old friend Low around, I began to pick up once more.  Now here we are in a kind of wilderness of hills and firwoods and boulders and snow and wooden houses.  So far as we have gone the climate is grey and harsh, but hungry and somnolent; and although not charming like that of Davos, essentially bracing and briskening.  The country is a kind of insane mixture of Scotland and a touch of Switzerland and a dash of America, and a thought of the British Channel in the skies.  We have a decent house—

December 6th.

—A decent house, as I was saying, sir, on a hill-top, with a look down a Scottish river in front, and on one hand a Perthshire hill; on the other, the beginnings and skirts of the village play hide and seek among other hills.  We have been below zero, I know not how far (10 at 8 A.M. once), and when it is cold it is delightful; but hitherto the cold has not held, and we have chopped in and out from frost to thaw, from snow to rain, from quiet air to the most disastrous north-westerly curdlers of the blood.  After a week of practical thaw, the ice still bears in favoured places.  So there is hope.

I wonder if you saw my book of verses?  It went into a second edition, because of my name, I suppose, and its prose merits.  I do not set up to be a poet.  Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings.  But I believe the very fact that it was only speech served the book with the public.  Horace is much a speaker, and see how popular! most of Martial is only speech, and I cannot conceive a person who does not love his Martial; most of Burns, also, such as ‘The Louse,’ ‘The Toothache,’ ‘The Haggis,’ and lots more of his best.  Excuse this little apology for my house; but I don’t like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.

p. 78To return to the more important—news.  My wife again suffers in high and cold places; I again profit.  She is off to-day to New York for a change, as heretofore to Berne, but I am glad to say in better case than then.  Still it is undeniable she suffers, and you must excuse her (at least) if we both prove bad correspondents.  I am decidedly better, but I have been terribly cut up with business complications: one disagreeable, as threatening loss; one, of the most intolerable complexion, as involving me in dishonour.  The burthen of consistent carelessness: I have lost much by it in the past; and for once (to my damnation) I have gained.  I am sure you will sympathise.  It is hard work to sleep; it is hard to be told you are a liar, and have to hold your peace, and think, ‘Yes, by God, and a thief too!’  You remember my lectures on Ajax, or the Unintentional Sin?  Well, I know all about that now.  Nothing seems so unjust to the sufferer: or is more just in essence.  Laissez passer la justice de Dieu.

Lloyd has learned to use the typewriter, and has most gallantly completed upon that the draft of a tale, which seems to me not without merit and promise, it is so silly, so gay, so absurd, in spots (to my partial eyes) so genuinely humorous.  It is true, he would not have written it but for the New Arabian Nights; but it is strange to find a young writer funny.  Heavens, but I was depressing when I took the pen in hand!  And now I doubt if I am sadder than my neighbours.  Will this beginner move in the inverse direction?

Let me have your news, and believe me, my dear Symonds, with genuine affection, yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

p. 79Saranac [December 1887].

MY DEAR LAD,—I was indeed overjoyed to hear of the Dumas.  In the matter of the dedication, are not cross dedications a little awkward?  Lang and Rider Haggard did it, to be sure.  Perpend.  And if you should conclude against a dedication, there is a passage in Memories and Portraits written at you, when I was most desperate (to stir you up a bit), which might be quoted: something about Dumas still waiting his biographer.  I have a decent time when the weather is fine; when it is grey, or windy, or wet (as it too often is), I am merely degraded to the dirt.  I get some work done every day with a devil of a heave; not extra good ever; and I regret my engagement.  Whiles I have had the most deplorable business annoyances too; have been threatened with having to refund money; got over that; and found myself in the worse scrape of being a kind of unintentional swindler.  These have worried me a great deal; also old age with his stealing steps seems to have clawed me in his clutch to some tune.

Do you play All Fours?  We are trying it; it is still all haze to me.  Can the elder hand beg more than once?  The Port Admiral is at Boston mingling with millionaires.  I am but a weed on Lethe wharf.  The wife is only so-so.  The Lord lead us all: if I can only get off the stage with clean hands, I shall sing Hosanna.  ‘Put’ is described quite differently from your version in a book I have; what are your rules?  The Port Admiral is using a game of put in a tale of his, the first copy of which was gloriously finished about a fortnight ago, and the revise gallantly begun: The Finsbury Tontine it is named, and might fill two volumes, and is quite incredibly silly, and in parts (it seems to me) pretty humorous.—Love to all from

An Old, Old Man.

I say, Taine’s Origines de la France Contemporaine is no end; it would turn the dead body of Charles Fox into a living Tory.

[Saranac Lake, December 1887.]

MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,—The Opal is very well; it is fed with glycerine when it seems hungry.  I am very well, and get about much more than I could have hoped.  My wife is not very well; there is no doubt the high level does not agree with her, and she is on the move for a holiday to New York.  Lloyd is at Boston on a visit, and I hope has a good time.  My mother is really first-rate; she and I, despairing of other games for two, now play All Fours out of a gamebook, and have not yet discovered its niceties, if any.

You will have heard, I dare say, that they made a great row over me here.  They also offered me much money, a great deal more than my works are worth: I took some of it, and was greedy and hasty, and am now very sorry.  I have done with big prices from now out.  Wealth and self-respect seem, in my case, to be strangers.

We were talking the other day of how well Fleeming managed to grow rich.  Ah, that is a rare art; something more intellectual than a virtue.  The book has not yet made its appearance here; the life alone, with a little preface, is to appear in the States; and the Scribners are to send you half the royalties.  I should like it to do well, for Fleeming’s sake.

Will you please send me the Greek water-carrier’s song?  I have a particular use for it.

Have I any more news, I wonder?—and echo wonders along with me.  I am strangely disquieted on all political matters; and I do not know if it is ‘the signs of the times’ or the sign of my own time of life.  But to me the sky seems black both in France and England, and only partly clear in America.  I have not seen it so dark in my time; of that I am sure.

Please let us have some news; and, excuse me, for the sake of my well-known idleness; and pardon Fanny, who p. 81is really not very well, for this long silence.—Very sincerely your friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Saranac Lake, December 1887.]

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,—I am so much afraid, our gamekeeper may weary of unacknowledged reports!  Hence, in the midst of a perfect horror of detestable weathers of a quite incongruous strain, and with less desire for correspondence than—well, than—well, with no desire for correspondence, behold me dash into the breach.  Do keep up your letters.  They are most delightful to this exiled backwoods family; and in your next, we shall hope somehow or other to hear better news of you and yours—that in the first place—and to hear more news of our beasts and birds and kindly fruits of earth and those human tenants who are (truly) too much with us.

I am very well; better than for years: that is for good.  But then my wife is no great shakes; the place does not suit her—it is my private opinion that no place does—and she is now away down to New York for a change, which (as Lloyd is in Boston) leaves my mother and me and Valentine alone in our wind-beleaguered hilltop hatbox of a house.  You should hear the cows butt against the walls in the early morning while they feed; you should also see our back log when the thermometer goes (as it does go) away—away below zero, till it can be seen no more by the eye of man—not the thermometer, which is still perfectly visible, but the mercury, which curls up into the bulb like a hibernating bear; you should also see the lad who ‘does p. 82chores’ for us, with his red stockings and his thirteen year old face, and his highly manly tramp into the room; and his two alternative answers to all questions about the weather: either ‘Cold,’ or with a really lyrical movement of the voice, ‘Lovely—raining!’

Will you take this miserable scarp for what it is worth?  Will you also understand that I am the man to blame, and my wife is really almost too much out of health to write, or at least doesn’t write?—And believe me, with kind remembrance to Mrs. Boodle and your sisters, very sincerely yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson

Saranac, 12th December ’87.

Give us news of all your folk.  A Merry Christmas from all of us.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—Will you please send £20 to — for a Christmas gift from —?  Moreover, I cannot remember what I told you to send to —; but as God has dealt so providentially with me this year, I now propose to make it £20.

I beg of you also to consider my strange position.  I jined a club which it was said was to defend the Union; and had a letter from the secretary, which his name I believe was Lord Warmingpan (or words to that effect), to say I am elected, and had better pay up a certain sum of money, I forget what.  Now I cannae verra weel draw a blank cheque and send to—

Lord Warmingpan (or words to that effect),
London, England.

And, man, if it was possible, I would be dooms glad to be out o’ this bit scrapie.  Mebbe the club was ca’d ‘The Union,’ but I wouldnae like to sweir; and mebbe it wasnae, or mebbe only words to that effec’—but I wouldnae care just exac’ly about sweirin’.  Do ye no think Henley, or Pollick, or some o’ they London fellies, micht mebbe p. 83perhaps find out for me? and just what the soom was?  And that you would aiblins pay for me?  For I thocht I was sae dam patriotic jinin’, and it would be a kind o’ a come-doun to be turned out again.  Mebbe Lang would ken; or mebbe Rider Haggyard: they’re kind o’ Union folks.  But it’s my belief his name was Warmingpan whatever. Yours,

Thomson,
alias Robert Louis Stevenson.

Could it be Warminster? [83]

Saranac Lake, New York [December 19, 1887].

DEAR MISS MONROE,—Many thanks for your letter and your good wishes.  It was much my desire to get to Chicago: had I done—or if I yet do—so, I shall hope to see the original of my photograph, which is one of my show possessions; but the fates are rather contrary.  My wife is far from well; I myself dread worse than almost any other imaginable peril, that miraculous and really insane invention the American Railroad Car.  Heaven help the man—may I add the woman—that sets foot in one!  Ah, if it were only an ocean to cross, it would be a matter of small thought to me—and great pleasure.  But the railroad car—every man has his weak point; and I fear the railroad car as abjectly as I do an earwig, and, on the whole, on better grounds.  You do not know how bitter it is to have to make such a confession; for you have not the pretension nor the weakness of a man.  If I do get to Chicago, you will hear of me: so much can be said.  And do you never come east?

I was pleased to recognise a word of my poor old Deacon in your letter.  It would interest me very much p. 84to hear how it went and what you thought of piece and actors; and my collaborator, who knows and respects the photograph, would be pleased too.—Still in the hope of seeing you, I am, yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac Lake, Winter 1887–8.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,—It may please you to know how our family has been employed.  In the silence of the snow the afternoon lamp has lighted an eager fireside group: my mother reading, Fanny, Lloyd, and I devoted listeners; and the work was really one of the best works I ever heard; and its author is to be praised and honoured; and what do you suppose is the name of it? and have you ever read it yourself? and (I am bound I will get to the bottom of the page before I blow the gaff, if I have to fight it out on this line all summer; for if you have not to turn a leaf, there can be no suspense, the conspectory eye being swift to pick out proper names; and without suspense, there can be little pleasure in this world, to my mind at least)—and, in short, the name of it is Roderick Hudson, if you please.  My dear James, it is very spirited, and very sound, and very noble too.  Hudson, Mrs. Hudson, Rowland, O, all first-rate: Rowland a very fine fellow; Hudson as good as he can stick (did you know Hudson?  I suspect you did), Mrs. H. his real born mother, a thing rarely managed in fiction.

We are all keeping pretty fit and pretty hearty; but this letter is not from me to you, it is from a reader of R. H. to the author of the same, and it says nothing, and has nothing to say, but thank you.

We are going to re-read Casamassima as a proper pendant.  Sir, I think these two are your best, and care not who knows it.

May I beg you, the next time Roderick is printed off, p. 85to go over the sheets of the last few chapters, and strike out ‘immense’ and ‘tremendous’?  You have simply dropped them there like your pocket-handkerchief; all you have to do is to pick them up and pouch them, and your room—what do I say?—your cathedral!—will be swept and garnished.—I am, dear sir, your delighted reader,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—Perhaps it is a pang of causeless honesty, perhaps.  I hope it will set a value on my praise of Roderick, perhaps it’s a burst of the diabolic, but I must break out with the news that I can’t bear the Portrait of a Lady.  I read it all, and I wept too; but I can’t stand your having written it; and I beg you will write no more of the like.  Infra, sir; Below you: I can’t help it—it may be your favourite work, but in my eyes it’s BELOW YOU to write and me to read.  I thought Roderick was going to be another such at the beginning; and I cannot describe my pleasure as I found it taking bones and blood, and looking out at me with a moved and human countenance, whose lineaments are written in my memory until my last of days.

R. L. S.

My wife begs your forgiveness; I believe for her silence.

Saranac Lake [December 1887].

MY DEAR COLVIN,—This goes to say that we are all fit, and the place is very bleak and wintry, and up to now has shown no such charms of climate as Davos, but is a place where men eat and where the cattarh, catarrh (cattarrh, or cattarrhh) appears to be unknown.  I walk in my verandy in the snaw, sir, looking down over one of those dabbled wintry landscapes that are (to be frank) so chilly to the human bosom, and up at a grey, English—nay, mehercle, Scottish—heaven; and I think it pretty bleak; and the wind swoops at me round the corner, like a lion, and fluffs the snow in my face; and I could aspire to be p. 86elsewhere; but yet I do not catch cold, and yet, when I come in, I eat.  So that hitherto Saranac, if not deliriously delectable, has not been a failure; nay, from the mere point of view of the wicked body, it has proved a success.  But I wish I could still get to the woods; alas, nous n’irons plus au bois is my poor song; the paths are buried, the dingles drifted full, a little walk is grown a long one; till spring comes, I fear the burthen will hold good.

I get along with my papers for Scribner not fast, nor so far specially well; only this last, the fourth one (which makes a third part of my whole task), I do believe is pulled off after a fashion.  It is a mere sermon: ‘Smith opens out’; [86] but it is true, and I find it touching and beneficial, to me at least; and I think there is some fine writing in it, some very apt and pregnant phrases.  Pulvis et Umbra, I call it; I might have called it a Darwinian Sermon, if I had wanted.  Its sentiments, although parsonic, will not offend even you, I believe.  The other three papers, I fear, bear many traces of effort, and the ungenuine inspiration of an income at so much per essay, and the honest desire of the incomer to give good measure for his money.  Well, I did my damndest anyway.

We have been reading H. James’s Roderick Hudson, which I eagerly press you to get at once: it is a book of a high order—the last volume in particular.  I wish Meredith would read it.  It took my breath away.

I am at the seventh book of the Æneid, and quite amazed at its merits (also very often floored by its difficulties).  The Circe passage at the beginning, and the sublime business of Amata with the simile of the boy’s top—O Lord, what a happy thought!—have specially delighted me.—I am, dear sir, your respected friend,

John Gregg Gillson, J.P., M.R.I.A., etc.

[Saranac, December 24, 1887.]

MY DEAR COLVIN,—Thank you for your explanations.  I have done no more Virgil since I finished the seventh book, for I have, first been eaten up with Taine, and next have fallen head over heels into a new tale, The Master of Ballantrae.  No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page ninety-two of the draft with great interest.  It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements; the most is a dead genuine human problem—human tragedy, I should say rather.  It will be about as long, I imagine, as Kidnapped.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

(1) My old Lord Durrisdeer.

(2) The Master of Ballantrae, and

(3) Henry Durie, his sons.

(4) Clementina, engaged to the first, married to the second.

(5) Ephraim Mackellar, land steward at Durrisdeer and narrator of the most of the book.

(6) Francis Burke, Chevalier de St. Louis, one of Prince Charlie’s Irishmen and narrator of the rest.

Besides these, many instant figures, most of them dumb or nearly so: Jessie Brown the whore, Captain Crail, Captain MacCombie, our old friend Alan Breck, our old friend Riach (both only for an instant), Teach the pirate (vulgarly Blackbeard), John Paul and Macconochie, servants at Durrisdeer.  The date is from 1745 to ’65 (about).  The scene, near Kirkcudbright, in the States, and for a little moment in the French East Indies.  I p. 88have done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord—Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil.  I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards; he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards.  ’Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry.  Here come my visitors—and have now gone, or the first relay of them; and I hope no more may come.  For mark you, sir, this is our ‘day’—Saturday, as ever was, and here we sit, my mother and I, before a large wood fire and await the enemy with the most steadfast courage; and without snow and greyness: and the woman Fanny in New York for her health, which is far from good; and the lad Lloyd at the inn in the village because he has a cold; and the handmaid Valentine abroad in a sleigh upon her messages; and to-morrow Christmas and no mistake.  Such is human life: la carrière humaine.  I will enclose, if I remember, the required autograph.

I will do better, put it on the back of this page.  Love to all, and mostly, my very dear Colvin, to yourself.  For whatever I say or do, or don’t say or do, you may be very sure I am,—Yours always affectionately,

R. L. S.

Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, N.Y., U.S.A., Christmas 1887.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,—And a very good Christmas to you all; and better fortune; and if worse, the more courage to support it—which I think is the kinder wish in all human affairs.  Somewhile—I fear a good while—after this, you should receive our Christmas gift; we have p. 89no tact and no taste, only a welcome and (often) tonic brutality; and I dare say the present, even after my friend Baxter has acted on and reviewed my hints, may prove a White Elephant.  That is why I dread presents.  And therefore pray understand if any element of that hamper prove unwelcome, it is to be exchanged.  I will not sit down under the name of a giver of White Elephants.  I never had any elephant but one, and his initials were R. L. S.; and he trod on my foot at a very early age.  But this is a fable, and not in the least to the point: which is that if, for once in my life, I have wished to make things nicer for anybody but the Elephant (see fable), do not suffer me to have made them ineffably more embarrassing, and exchange—ruthlessly exchange!

For my part, I am the most cockered up of any mortal being; and one of the healthiest, or thereabout, at some modest distance from the bull’s eye.  I am condemned to write twelve articles in Scribner’s Magazine for the love of gain; I think I had better send you them; what is far more to the purpose, I am on the jump with a new story which has bewitched me—I doubt it may bewitch no one else.  It is called The Master of Ballantrae—pronounce Bällän-tray.  If it is not good, well, mine will be the fault; for I believe it is a good tale.

The greetings of the season to you, and your mother, and your sisters.  My wife heartily joins.—And I am, yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—You will think me an illiterate dog: I am, for the first time, reading Robertson’s Sermons.  I do not know how to express how much I think of them.  If by any chance you should be as illiterate as I, and not know them, it is worth while curing the defect.

R. L. S.

p. 90Saranac Lake, January ’88.

DEAR CHARLES,—You are the flower of Doers. . . . Will my doer collaborate thus much in my new novel?  In the year 1794 or 5, Mr. Ephraim Mackellar, A.M., late steward on the Durrisdeer estates, completed a set of memoranda (as long as a novel) with regard to the death of the (then) late Lord Durrisdeer, and as to that of his attainted elder brother, called by the family courtesy title the Master of Ballantrae.  These he placed in the hands of John Macbrair.  W.S., the family agent, on the understanding they were to be sealed until 1862, when a century would have elapsed since the affair in the wilderness (my lord’s death).  You succeeded Mr. Macbrair’s firm; the Durrisdeers are extinct; and last year, in an old green box, you found these papers with Macbrair’s indorsation.  It is that indorsation of which I want a copy; you may remember, when you gave me the papers, I neglected to take that, and I am sure you are a man too careful of antiquities to have let it fall aside.  I shall have a little introduction descriptive of my visit to Edinburgh, arrival there, denner with yoursel’, and first reading of the papers in your smoking-room: all of which, of course, you well remember.—Ever yours affectionately,

R. L S.

Your name is my friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S.!!!

Saranac, Winter 1887–8.

DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,—I am keeping the sermon to see if I can’t add another.  Meanwhile, I will send you very soon a different paper which may take its place.  Possibly some of these days soon I may get together a p. 91talk on things current, which should go in (if possible) earlier than either.  I am now less nervous about these papers; I believe I can do the trick without great strain, though the terror that breathed on my back in the beginning is not yet forgotten.

The Master of Ballantrae I have had to leave aside, as I was quite worked out.  But in about a week I hope to try back and send you the first four numbers: these are all drafted, it is only the revision that has broken me down, as it is often the hardest work.  These four I propose you should set up for me at once, and we’ll copyright ’em in a pamphlet.  I will tell you the names of the bona fide purchasers in England.

The numbers will run from twenty to thirty pages of my manuscript.  You can give me that much, can you not?  It is a howling good tale—at least these first four numbers are; the end is a trifle more fantastic, but ’tis all picturesque.

Don’t trouble about any more French books; I am on another scent, you see, just now.  Only the French in Hindustan I await with impatience, as that is for Ballantrae.  The scene of that romance is Scotland—the States—Scotland—India—Scotland—and the States again; so it jumps like a flea.  I have enough about the States now, and very much obliged I am; yet if Drake’s Tragedies of the Wilderness is (as I gather) a collection of originals, I should like to purchase it.  If it is a picturesque vulgarisation, I do not wish to look it in the face.  Purchase, I say; for I think it would be well to have some such collection by me with a view to fresh works.—Yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—If you think of having the Master illustrated, I suggest that Hole would be very well up to the Scottish, which is the larger part.  If you have it done here, tell your artist to look at the hall of Craigievar in Billing’s Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities, and he will get a p. 92broad hint for the hall at Durrisdeer: it is, I think, the chimney of Craigievar and the roof of Pinkie, and perhaps a little more of Pinkie altogether; but I should have to see the book myself to be sure.  Hole would be invaluable for this.  I dare say if you had it illustrated, you could let me have one or two for the English edition.

R. L. S.

[Saranac, Winter 1887–8.]

MY DEAR ARCHER,—What am I to say?  I have read your friend’s book with singular relish.  If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the deficiency.  It is full of promise; but I should like to know his age.  There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach small importance; it is the shape of the age.  And there are passages, particularly the rally in presence of the Zulu king, that show genuine and remarkable narrative talent—a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a narrator.

As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish.  Over Bashville the footman I howled with derision and delight; I dote on Bashville—I could read of him for ever; de Bashville je suis le fervent—there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; Bashville est magnifique, mais il n’est guère possible.  He is the note of the book.  It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott’s or Dumas’, and then he daubs in little bits of socialism; he soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon—even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the quest—and I believe in his heart he p. 93thinks he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism.

It is this that makes me—the most hardened adviser now extant—stand back and hold my peace.  If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with his eyes open;—or perhaps he knows it;—God knows!—my brain is softened.

It is HORRID FUN.  All I ask is more of it.  Thank you for the pleasure you gave us, and tell me more of the inimitable author.

(I say, Archer, my God, what women!)—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac, February 1888.

MY DEAR ARCHER,—Pretty sick in bed; but necessary to protest and continue your education.

Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes?  You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing).  The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material.  That is the only test I know of writing.  If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it’s amateur work.  Then you will bring me up with old Dumas.  Nay, the object of a story is to be long, to fill up hours; the story-teller’s art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing.  That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off their bones.

I would rise from the dead to preach!

Hope all well.  I think my wife better, but she’s not allowed to write; and this (only wrung from me by desire p. 94to Boss and Parsonise and Dominate, strong in sickness) is my first letter for days, and will likely be my last for many more.  Not blame my wife for her silence: doctor’s orders.  All much interested by your last, and fragment from brother, and anecdotes of Tomarcher.—The sick but still Moral

R. L. S.

Tell Shaw to hurry up: I want another.

[Saranac, Spring 1888?]

MY DEAR ARCHER,—It happened thus.  I came forth from that performance in a breathing heat of indignation.  (Mind, at this distance of time and with my increased knowledge, I admit there is a problem in the piece; but I saw none then, except a problem in brutality; and I still consider the problem in that case not established.)  On my way down the Français stairs, I trod on an old gentleman’s toes, whereupon with that suavity that so well becomes me, I turned about to apologise, and on the instant, repenting me of that intention, stopped the apology midway, and added something in French to this effect: No, you are one of the lâches who have been applauding that piece.  I retract my apology.  Said the old Frenchman, laying his hand on my arm, and with a smile that was truly heavenly in temperance, irony, good-nature, and knowledge of the world, ‘Ah, monsieur, vous êtes bien jeune!’—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Saranac [February 1888].

DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,—Will you send me (from the library) some of the works of my dear old G. P. R. James.  p. 95With the following especially I desire to make or to renew acquaintance: The Songster, The Gipsy, The Convict, The Stepmother, The Gentleman of the Old School, The Robber.

Excusez du peu.

This sudden return to an ancient favourite hangs upon an accident.  The ‘Franklin County Library’ contains two works of his, The Cavalier and Morley Ernstein.  I read the first with indescribable amusement—it was worse than I had feared, and yet somehow engaging; the second (to my surprise) was better than I had dared to hope: a good honest, dull, interesting tale, with a genuine old-fashioned talent in the invention when not strained; and a genuine old-fashioned feeling for the English language.  This experience awoke appetite, and you see I have taken steps to stay it.

R. L. S.

[Saranac, February 1888.]

DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,—1.  Of course then don’t use it.  Dear Man, I write these to please you, not myself, and you know a main sight better than I do what is good.  In that case, however, I enclose another paper, and return the corrected proof of Pulvis et Umbra, so that we may be afloat.

2.  I want to say a word as to the Master.  (The Master of Ballantrae shall be the name by all means.)  If you like and want it, I leave it to you to make an offer.  You may remember I thought the offer you made when I was still in England too small; by which I did not at all mean, I thought it less than it was worth, but too little to tempt me to undergo the disagreeables of serial publication.  This tale (if you want it) you are to have; for it is the least I can do for you; and you are to observe that the sum you pay me for my articles going far to meet my wants, I am quite open to be satisfied with less than formerly.  I tell you I do dislike this battle of the dollars.  p. 96I feel sure you all pay too much here in America; and I beg you not to spoil me any more.  For I am getting spoiled: I do not want wealth, and I feel these big sums demoralise me.

My wife came here pretty ill; she had a dreadful bad night; to-day she is better.  But now Valentine is ill; and Lloyd and I have got breakfast, and my hand somewhat shakes after washing dishes.—Yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

P.S.—Please order me the Evening Post for two months.  My subscription is run out.  The Mutiny and Edwardes to hand.

[Saranac, March 1888.]

MY DEAR COLVIN,—Fanny has been very unwell.  She is not long home, has been ill again since her return, but is now better again to a degree.  You must not blame her for not writing, as she is not allowed to write at all, not even a letter.  To add to our misfortunes, Valentine is quite ill and in bed.  Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes washed and the kitchen all clear, and sit down to give you as much news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement.  Glass is a thing that really breaks my spirit: I do not like to fail, and with glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling—the artist’s.

I am, as you may gather from this, wonderfully better: this harsh, grey, glum, doleful climate has done me good.  You cannot fancy how sad a climate it is.  When the thermometer stays all day below 10°, it is really cold; and when the wind blows, O commend me to the result.  Pleasure in life is all delete; there is no red spot left, fires do not radiate, you burn your hands all the time on what seem to be cold stones.  It is odd, zero is like summer heat to us now; and we like, when the thermometer p. 97outside is really low, a room at about 48°: 60° we find oppressive.  Yet the natives keep their holes at 90° or even 100°.

This was interrupted days ago by household labours.  Since then I have had and (I tremble to write it, but it does seem as if I had) beaten off an influenza.  The cold is exquisite.  Valentine still in bed.  The proofs of the first part of the Master of Ballantrae begin to come in; soon you shall have it in the pamphlet form; and I hope you will like it.  The second part will not be near so good; but there—we can but do as it’ll do with us.  I have every reason to believe this winter has done me real good, so far as it has gone; and if I carry out my scheme for next winter, and succeeding years, I should end by being a tower of strength.  I want you to save a good holiday for next winter; I hope we shall be able to help you to some larks.  Is there any Greek Isle you would like to explore? or any creek in Asia Minor?—Yours ever affectionately,

R. L. S.

[Saranac Lake, Winter 1887–1888.]

MY DEAR DR. CHARTERIS,—I have asked Douglas and Foulis to send you my last volume, so that you may possess my little paper on my father in a permanent shape; not for what that is worth, but as a tribute of respect to one whom my father regarded with such love, esteem, and affection.  Besides, as you will see, I have brought you under contribution, and I have still to thank you for your letter to my mother; so more than kind; in much, so just.  It is my hope, when time and health permit, to do something more definite for my father’s memory.  You are one of the very few who can (if you p. 98will) help me.  Pray believe that I lay on you no obligation; I know too well, you may believe me, how difficult it is to put even two sincere lines upon paper, where all, too, is to order.  But if the spirit should ever move you, and you should recall something memorable of your friend, his son will heartily thank you for a note of it.—With much respect, believe me, yours sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Saranac Lake, March 1888.]

MY DEAR DELIGHTFUL JAMES,—To quote your heading to my wife, I think no man writes so elegant a letter, I am sure none so kind, unless it be Colvin, and there is more of the stern parent about him.  I was vexed at your account of my admired Meredith: I wish I could go and see him; as it is I will try to write.  I read with indescribable admiration your Emerson.  I begin to long for the day when these portraits of yours shall be collected: do put me in.  But Emerson is a higher flight.  Have you a Tourgueneff?  You have told me many interesting things of him, and I seem to see them written, and forming a graceful and bildend sketch.  My novel is a tragedy; four parts out of six or seven are written, and gone to Burlingame.  Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the last one or two, I regret to say, not so soundly designed; I almost hesitate to write them; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning.  I wish I knew; that was how the tale came to me however.  I got the situation; it was an old taste of mine: The older brother goes out in the ’45, the younger stays; the younger, of course, gets title and estate and marries the bride designate of the elder—a family match, but he (the younger) had always loved her, and she had really loved the elder.  Do you see the situation?  Then the devil and Saranac p. 99suggested this dénouement, and I joined the two ends in a day or two of constant feverish thought, and began to write.  And now—I wonder if I have not gone too far with the fantastic?  The elder brother is an INCUBUS: supposed to be killed at Culloden, he turns up again and bleeds the family of money; on that stopping he comes and lives with them, whence flows the real tragedy, the nocturnal duel of the brothers (very naturally, and indeed, I think, inevitably arising), and second supposed death of the elder.  Husband and wife now really make up, and then the cloven hoof appears.  For the third supposed death and the manner of the third reappearance is steep; steep, sir.  It is even very steep, and I fear it shames the honest stuff so far; but then it is highly pictorial, and it leads up to the death of the elder brother at the hands of the younger in a perfectly cold-blooded murder, of which I wish (and mean) the reader to approve.  You see how daring is the design.  There are really but six characters, and one of these episodic, and yet it covers eighteen years, and will be, I imagine, the longest of my works.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

Read Gosse’s Raleigh.  First-rate.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

Saranac Lake, Adirondacks,
New York, U.S.A., Spring 1888.

MY DEAR DR. CHARTERIS,—The funeral letter, your notes, and many other things, are reserved for a book, Memorials of a Scottish Family, if ever I can find time and opportunity.  I wish I could throw off all else and sit down to it to-day.  Yes, my father was a ‘distinctly religious man,’ but not a pious.  The distinction painfully and pleasurably recalls old conflicts; it used to be my great gun—and you, who suffered for the whole Church, know how needful it was to have some reserve artillery!  p. 100His sentiments were tragic; he was a tragic thinker.  Now, granted that life is tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper function of religion to make us accept and serve in that tragedy, as officers in that other and comparable one of war.  Service is the word, active service, in the military sense; and the religious man—I beg pardon, the pious man—is he who has a military joy in duty—not he who weeps over the wounded.  We can do no more than try to do our best.  Really, I am the grandson of the manse—I preach you a kind of sermon.  Box the brat’s ears!

My mother—to pass to matters more within my competence—finely enjoys herself.  The new country, some new friends we have made, the interesting experiment of this climate-which (at least) is tragic—all have done her good.  I have myself passed a better winter than for years, and now that it is nearly over have some diffident hopes of doing well in the summer and ‘eating a little more air’ than usual.

I thank you for the trouble you are taking, and my mother joins with me in kindest regards to yourself and Mrs. Charteris.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Saranac Lake, Spring 1888.]

DEAR MINISTER OF THE FREE KIRK AT PENICUIK,—For O, man, I cannae read your name!—That I have been so long in answering your delightful letter sits on my conscience badly.  The fact is I let my correspondence accumulate until I am going to leave a place; and then I pitch in, overhaul the pile, and my cries of penitence might be heard a mile about.  Yesterday I despatched thirty-five belated letters: conceive the state of my conscience, above all as the Sins of Omission (see boyhood’s guide, the Shorter Catechism) are in my view the only p. 101serious ones; I call it my view, but it cannot have escaped you that it was also Christ’s.  However, all that is not to the purpose, which is to thank you for the sincere pleasure afforded by your charming letter.  I get a good few such; how few that please me at all, you would be surprised to learn—or have a singularly just idea of the dulness of our race; how few that please me as yours did, I can tell you in one word—None.  I am no great kirkgoer, for many reasons—and the sermon’s one of them, and the first prayer another, but the chief and effectual reason is the stuffiness.  I am no great kirkgoer, says I, but when I read yon letter of yours, I thought I would like to sit under ye.  And then I saw ye were to send me a bit buik, and says I, I’ll wait for the bit buik, and then I’ll mebbe can read the man’s name, and anyway I’ll can kill twa birds wi’ ae stane.  And, man! the buik was ne’er heard tell o’!

That fact is an adminicle of excuse for my delay.

And now, dear minister of the illegible name, thanks to you, and greeting to your wife, and may you have good guidance in your difficult labours, and a blessing on your life.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

(No just so young sae young’s he was, though—
I’m awfae near forty, man.)

Address c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons,
743 Broadway, New York.

Don’t put ‘N.B.’ in your paper: put Scotland, and be done with it.  Alas, that I should be thus stabbed in the home of my friends!  The name of my native land is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours.

R. L. S.

[Saranac Lake, April 1888.]

MY DEAREST COGGIE,—I wish I could find the letter I began to you some time ago when I was ill; but I can’t p. 102and I don’t believe there was much in it anyway.  We have all behaved like pigs and beasts and barn-door poultry to you; but I have been sunk in work, and the lad is lazy and blind and has been working too; and as for Fanny, she has been (and still is) really unwell.  I had a mean hope you might perhaps write again before I got up steam: I could not have been more ashamed of myself than I am, and I should have had another laugh.

They always say I cannot give news in my letters: I shall shake off that reproach.  On Monday, if she is well enough, Fanny leaves for California to see her friends; it is rather an anxiety to let her go alone; but the doctor simply forbids it in my case, and she is better anywhere than here—a bleak, blackguard, beggarly climate, of which I can say no good except that it suits me and some others of the same or similar persuasions whom (by all rights) it ought to kill.  It is a form of Arctic St. Andrews, I should imagine; and the miseries of forty degrees below zero, with a high wind, have to be felt to be appreciated.  The greyness of the heavens here is a circumstance eminently revolting to the soul; I have near forgot the aspect of the sun—I doubt if this be news; it is certainly no news to us.  My mother suffers a little from the inclemency of the place, but less on the whole than would be imagined.  Among other wild schemes, we have been projecting yacht voyages; and I beg to inform you that Cogia Hassan was cast for the part of passenger.  They may come off!—Again this is not news.  The lad?  Well, the lad wrote a tale this winter, which appeared to me so funny that I have taken it in hand, and some of these days you will receive a copy of a work entitled ‘A Game of Bluff, by Lloyd Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson.’

Otherwise he (the lad) is much as usual.  There remains, I believe, to be considered only R. L. S., the house-bond, prop, pillar, bread-winner, and bully of the establishment.  Well, I do think him much better; he is p. 103making piles of money; the hope of being able to hire a yacht ere long dances before his eyes; otherwise he is not in very high spirits at this particular moment, though compared with last year at Bournemouth an angel of joy.

And now is this news, Cogia, or is it not?  It all depends upon the point of view, and I call it news.  The devil of it is that I can think of nothing else, except to send you all our loves, and to wish exceedingly you were here to cheer us all up.  But we’ll see about that on board the yacht.—Your affectionate friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Saranac Lake], April 9th!! 1888

MY DEAR COLVIN,—I have been long without writing to you, but am not to blame, I had some little annoyances quite for a private eye, but they ran me so hard that I could not write without lugging them in, which (for several reasons) I did not choose to do.  Fanny is off to San Francisco, and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner’s.  Where we shall go I know not, nor (I was going to say) care; so bald and bad is my frame of mind.  Do you know our—ahem!—fellow clubman, Colonel Majendie?  I had such an interesting letter from him.  Did you see my sermon?  It has evoked the worst feeling: I fear people don’t care for the truth, or else I don’t tell it.  Suffer me to wander without purpose.  I have sent off twenty letters to-day, and begun and stuck at a twenty-first, and taken a copy of one which was on business, and corrected several galleys of proof, and sorted about a bushel of old letters; so if any one has a right to be romantically stupid it is I—and I am.  Really deeply stupid, and at that stage when in old days I used to pour out words without any meaning whatever and with my mind taking no part in the performance.  I suspect that p. 104is now the case.  I am reading with extraordinary pleasure the life of Lord Lawrence: Lloyd and I have a mutiny novel—

(Next morning, after twelve other letters)—mutiny novel on hand—a tremendous work—so we are all at Indian books.  The idea of the novel is Lloyd’s: I call it a novel.  ’Tis a tragic romance, of the most tragic sort: I believe the end will be almost too much for human endurance—when the hero is thrown to the ground with one of his own (Sepoy) soldier’s knees upon his chest, and the cries begin in the Beebeeghar.  O truly, you know it is a howler!  The whole last part is—well the difficulty is that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I don’t know who is to write it.

I still keep wonderful.  I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle.  Dear sir, sincerely yours,

Andrew Jackson.

[Saranac Lake, April 1888.]
Address c/o Messrs. Scribner’s Sons,
743 Broadway, N.Y.

MY DEAR GAMEKEEPER,—Your p. c. (proving you a good student of Micawber) has just arrived, and it paves the way to something I am anxious to say.  I wrote a paper the other day—Pulvis et Umbra;—I wrote it with great feeling and conviction: to me it seemed bracing and healthful, it is in such a world (so seen by me), that I am very glad to fight out my battle, and see some fine sunsets, and hear some excellent jests between whiles round the camp fire.  But I find that to some people this vision of mine is a nightmare, and extinguishes all ground of faith in God or pleasure in man.  Truth I think not so much of; for I do not know it.  And I could wish in my heart that I had not published this paper, if it troubles folk too much: all have not the same digestion, nor the same sight of things.  And it came over me with special pain that perhaps this article (which I was at the pains to p. 105send to her) might give dismalness to my Gamekeeper at Home.  Well, I cannot take back what I have said; but yet I may add this.  If my view be everything but the nonsense that it may be—to me it seems self-evident and blinding truth—surely of all things it makes this world holier.  There is nothing in it but the moral side—but the great battle and the breathing times with their refreshments.  I see no more and no less.  And if you look again, it is not ugly, and it is filled with promise.

Pray excuse a desponding author for this apology.  My wife is away off to the uttermost parts of the States, all by herself.  I shall be off, I hope, in a week; but where?  Ah! that I know not.  I keep wonderful, and my wife a little better, and the lad flourishing.  We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct . . . I may be said to live for these instrumental labours now, but I have always some childishness on hand.—I am, dear Gamekeeper, your indulgent but intemperate Squire,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

p. 106Union House, Manasquan, N.J., but address to Scribner’s,
11th May 1888.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—I have found a yacht, and we are going the full pitch for seven months.  If I cannot get my health back (more or less), ’tis madness; but, of course, there is the hope, and I will play big. . . . If this business fails to set me up, well, £2000 is gone, and I know I can’t get better.  We sail from San Francisco, June 15th, for the South Seas in the yacht Casco.—With a million thanks for all your dear friendliness, ever yours affectionately,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Manasquan, New Jersey, 27th May 1888.

DEAR HOMER ST. GAUDENS,—Your father has brought you this day to see me, and he tells me it is his hope you may remember the occasion.  I am going to do what I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse you, years after, to see this little scrap of paper and to read what I write.  I must begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character.  You were also (I use the past tense, with a view to the time when you shall read, rather than to that when I am writing) a very pretty boy, and (to my European views) startlingly self-possessed.  My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I can say no more: what else I marked, what restlessness of foot and hand, what graceful clumsiness, what experimental designs upon the furniture, was p. 107but the common inheritance of human youth.  But you may perhaps like to know that the lean flushed man in bed, who interested you so little, was in a state of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant: harassed with work which he thought he was not doing well, troubled with difficulties to which you will in time succeed, and yet looking forward to no less a matter than a voyage to the South Seas and the visitation of savage and desert islands.—Your father’s friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Manasquan (ahem!), New Jersey, May 28th, 1888.

MY DEAR JAMES,—With what a torrent it has come at last!  Up to now, what I like best is the first number of a London Life.  You have never done anything better, and I don’t know if perhaps you have ever done anything so good as the girl’s outburst: tip-top.  I have been preaching your later works in your native land.  I had to present the Beltraffio volume to Low, and it has brought him to his knees; he was amazed at the first part of Georgina’s Reasons, although (like me) not so well satisfied with Part II.  It is annoying to find the American public as stupid as the English, but they will waken up in time: I wonder what they will think of Two Nations? . . .

This, dear James, is a valedictory.  On June 15th the schooner yacht Casco will (weather and a jealous providence permitting) steam through the Golden Gates for Honolulu, Tahiti, the Galapagos, Guayaquil, and—I hope not the bottom of the Pacific.  It will contain your obedient ’umble servant and party.  It seems too good to be true, and is a very good way of getting through the green-sickness of maturity which, with all its accompanying ills, is now declaring itself in my mind and life.  They tell me it is not so severe as that of youth; if I (and the Casco) are spared, I shall tell you more exactly, as I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.

p. 108Good-bye, then, my dear fellow, and please write us a word; we expect to have three mails in the next two months: Honolulu, Tahiti, and Guayaquil.  But letters will be forwarded from Scribner’s, if you hear nothing more definite directly.  In 3 (three) days I leave for San Francisco.—Ever yours most cordially,

R. L. S.

Yacht ‘Casco,’ Anaho Bay, Nukahiva,
Marquesas Islands [July 1888].

MY DEAR COLVIN,—From this somewhat (ahem) out of the way place, I write to say how d’ye do.  It is all a swindle: I chose these isles as having the most beastly population, and they are far better, and far more civilised than we.  I know one old chief Ko-o-amua, a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies even as he walked home from killing ’em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple-minded: no fool, though.

The climate is delightful; and the harbour where we lie one of the loveliest spots imaginable.  Yesterday evening we had near a score natives on board; lovely parties.  We have a native god; very rare now.  Very rare and equally absurd to view.

This sort of work is not favourable to correspondence: it takes me all the little strength I have to go about and see, and then come home and note, the strangeness around us.  I shouldn’t wonder if there came trouble here some day, all the same.  I could name a nation that is not beloved in certain islands—and it does not know it! [114]  Strange: like ourselves, perhaps, in India!  Love to all and much to yourself.

R. L. S.

Yacht ‘Casco,’ at sea, near the Paumotus,
7 A.M., September 6th, 1888, with a dreadful pen.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—Last night as I lay under my blanket in the cockpit, courting sleep, I had a comic seizure.  There was nothing visible but the southern stars, and the steersman there out by the binnacle lamp; we were all looking forward to a most deplorable landfall on the morrow, praying God we should fetch a tuft of p. 115palms which are to indicate the Dangerous Archipelago; the night was as warm as milk, and all of a sudden I had a vision of—Drummond Street.  It came on me like a flash of lightning: I simply returned thither, and into the past.  And when I remember all I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford’s in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc. etc.  And then now—what a change!  I feel somehow as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate at the corner of that dreary thoroughfare for all students to read, poor devils, when their hearts are down.  And I felt I must write one word to you.  Excuse me if I write little: when I am at sea, it gives me a headache; when I am in port, I have my diary crying ‘Give, give.’  I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done—except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese.  Good luck to you, God bless you.—Your affectionate friend,

R. L. S.

Fakarava, Low Archipelago, September 21st, 1888.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—Only a word.  Get out your big atlas, and imagine a straight line from San Francisco to Anaho, the N.E. corner of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands; imagine three weeks there: imagine a day’s sail on August 12th round the eastern end of the island to Tai-o-hae, the capital; imagine us there till August 22nd: imagine us skirt the east side of Ua-pu—perhaps Rona-Poa on your atlas—and through the Bondelais straits to Taaka-uku in Hiva-Oa, where we arrive on the 23rd; imagine us there until September 4th, when we sailed for Fakarava, which we reached on the 9th, after a p. 116very difficult and dangerous passage among these isles.  Tuesday, we shall leave for Taiti, where I shall knock off and do some necessary work ashore.  It looks pretty bald in the atlas; not in fact; nor I trust in the 130 odd pages of diary which I have just been looking up for these dates: the interest, indeed, has been incredible: I did not dream there were such places or such races.  My health has stood me splendidly; I am in for hours wading over the knees for shells; I have been five hours on horseback: I have been up pretty near all night waiting to see where the Casco would go ashore, and with my diary all ready—simply the most entertaining night of my life.  Withal I still have colds; I have one now, and feel pretty sick too; but not as at home: instead of being in bed, for instance, I am at this moment sitting snuffling and writing in an undershirt and trousers; and as for colour, hands, arms, feet, legs, and face, I am browner than the berry: only my trunk and the aristocratic spot on which I sit retain the vile whiteness of the north.

Please give my news and kind love to Henley, Henry James, and any whom you see of well-wishers.  Accept from me the very best of my affection: and believe me ever yours,

The Old Man Virulent.

Taiti, October 7th, 1888.

Never having found a chance to send this off, I may add more of my news.  My cold took a very bad turn, and I am pretty much out of sorts at this particular, living in a little bare one-twentieth-furnished house, surrounded by mangoes, etc.  All the rest are well, and I mean to be soon.  But these Taiti colds are very severe and, to children, often fatal; so they were not the thing for me.  Yesterday the brigantine came in from San Francisco, so we can get our letters off soon.  There are in Papeete at this moment, in a little wooden house with grated verandahs, two people who love you very much, and one of them is

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Taiti, as ever was, 6th October 1888.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—. . . You will receive a lot of mostly very bad proofs of photographs: the paper was so bad.  Please keep them very private, as they are for the book.  We send them, having learned so dread a fear of the sea, that we wish to put our eggs in different baskets.  We have been thrice within an ace of being ashore: we were lost (!) for about twelve hours in the Low Archipelago, but by God’s blessing had quiet weather all the time; and once, in a squall, we cam’ so near gaun heels ower hurdies, that I really dinnae ken why we didnae athegither.  Hence, as I say, a great desire to put our eggs in different baskets, particularly on the Pacific (aw-haw-haw) Pacific Ocean.

You can have no idea what a mean time we have had, owing to incidental beastlinesses, nor what a glorious, owing to the intrinsic interest of these isles.  I hope the book will be a good one; nor do I really very much doubt that—the stuff is so curious; what I wonder is, if the public will rise to it.  A copy of my journal, or as much of it as is made, shall go to you also; it is, of course, quite imperfect, much being to be added and corrected; but O, for the eggs in the different baskets.

All the rest are well enough, and all have enjoyed the cruise so far, in spite of its drawbacks.  We have had an awfae time in some ways, Mr. Baxter; and if I wasnae sic a verra patient man (when I ken that I have to be) there wad hae been a braw row; and ance if I hadnae happened to be on deck about three in the marnin’, I think there would have been murder done.  The American Mairchant Marine is a kent service; ye’ll have heard its praise, I’m thinkin’; an’ if ye never did, ye can get Twa Years Before the Mast, by Dana, whaur forbye a great deal o’ pleisure, ye’ll get a’ the needcessary information.  Love to your father and all the family.—Ever your affectionate friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Taiti, October 10th, 1888.

DEAR GIVER,—I am at a loss to conceive your object in giving me to a person so locomotory as my proprietor.  The number of thousand miles that I have travelled, the strange bed-fellows with which I have been made acquainted, I lack the requisite literary talent to make clear to your imagination.  I speak of bed-fellows; pocket-fellows would be a more exact expression, for the place of my abode is in my master’s righthand trouser-pocket; and there, as he waded on the resounding beaches of Nukahiva, or in the shallow tepid water on the reef of Fakarava, I have been overwhelmed by and buried among all manner of abominable South Sea shells, beautiful enough in their way, I make no doubt, but singular company for any self-respecting paper-cutter.  He, my master—or as I more justly call him, my bearer; for although I occasionally serve him, does not he serve me daily and all day long, carrying me like an African potentate on my subject’s legs?—he is delighted with these isles, and this climate, and these savages, and a variety of other things.  He now blows a flageolet with singular effects: sometimes the poor thing appears stifled with shame, sometimes it screams with agony; he pursues his career with truculent insensibility.  Health appears to reign in the party.  I was very nearly sunk in a squall.  I am sorry I ever left England, for here there are no books to be had, and without books there is no stable situation for, dear Giver, your affectionate

Wooden Paper-Cutter.

A neighbouring pair of scissors snips a kiss in your direction.

Taiti, October 16th, 1888.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—The cruiser for San Francisco departs to-morrow morning bearing you some kind of a scratch.  This much more important packet will travel by way of Auckland.  It contains a ballant; and I think a better ballant than I expected ever to do.  I can imagine how you will wag your pow over it; and how ragged you will find it, etc., but has it not spirit all the same? and though the verse is not all your fancy painted it, has it not some life?  And surely, as narrative, the thing has considerable merit!  Read it, get a typewritten copy taken, and send me that and your opinion to the Sandwiches.  I know I am only courting the most excruciating mortification; but the real cause of my sending the thing is that I could bear to go down myself, but not to have much MS. go down with me.  To say truth, we are through the most dangerous; but it has left in all minds a strong sense of insecurity, and we are all for putting eggs in various baskets.

We leave here soon, bound for Uahiva, Reiatea, Bora-Bora, and the Sandwiches.

O, how my spirit languishes
To step ashore on the Sanguishes;
For there my letters wait,
There shall I know my fate.
O, how my spirit languidges
To step ashore on the Sanguidges.

18th.—I think we shall leave here if all is well on Monday.  I am quite recovered, astonishingly recovered. It must be owned these climates and this voyage have p. 120given me more strength than I could have thought possible.  And yet the sea is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper, the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers—but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world.  Much trouble has attended this trip, but I must confess more pleasure.  Nor should I ever complain, as in the last few weeks, with the curing of my illness indeed, as if that were the bursting of an abscess, the cloud has risen from my spirits and to some degree from my temper.  Do you know what they called the Casco at Fakarava?  The Silver Ship.  Is that not pretty?  Pray tell Mrs. Jenkin, die silberne Frau, as I only learned it since I wrote her.  I think of calling the book by that name: The Cruise of the Silver Ship—so there will be one poetic page at least—the title.  At the Sandwiches we shall say farewell to the S. S. with mingled feelings.  She is a lovely creature: the most beautiful thing at this moment in Taiti.

Well, I will take another sheet, though I know I have nothing to say.  You would think I was bursting: but the voyage is all stored up for the book, which is to pay for it, we fondly hope; and the troubles of the time are not worth telling; and our news is little.

Here I conclude (Oct. 24th, I think), for we are now stored, and the Blue Peter metaphorically flies.

R. L. S.

Taiti, October 17th, 1888.

DEAR ARCHER,—Though quite unable to write letters, I nobly send you a line signifying nothing.  The voyage has agreed well with all; it has had its pains, and its p. 121extraordinary pleasures; nothing in the world can equal the excitement of the first time you cast anchor in some bay of a tropical island, and the boats begin to surround you, and the tattooed people swarm aboard.  Tell Tomarcher, with my respex, that hide-and-seek is not equal to it; no, nor hidee-in-the-dark; which, for the matter of that, is a game for the unskilful: the artist prefers daylight, a good-sized garden, some shrubbery, an open paddock, and—come on, Macduff.

Tomarcher, I am now a distinguished litterytour, but that was not the real bent of my genius.  I was the best player of hide-and-seek going; not a good runner, I was up to every shift and dodge, I could jink very well, I could crawl without any noise through leaves, I could hide under a carrot plant, it used to be my favourite boast that I always walked into the den.  You may care to hear, Tomarcher, about the children in these parts; their parents obey them, they do not obey their parents; and I am sorry to tell you (for I dare say you are already thinking the idea a good one) that it does not pay one halfpenny.  There are three sorts of civilisation, Tomarcher: the real old-fashioned one, in which children either had to find out how to please their dear papas, or their dear papas cut their heads off.  This style did very well, but is now out of fashion.  Then the modern European style: in which children have to behave reasonably well, and go to school and say their prayers, or their dear papas will know the reason why.  This does fairly well.  Then there is the South Sea Island plan, which does not do one bit.  The children beat their parents here; it does not make their parents any better; so do not try it.

Dear Tomarcher, I have forgotten the address of your new house, but will send this to one of your papa’s publishers.  Remember us all to all of you, and believe me, yours respectably,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Tautira (The Garden of the World), otherwise called
Hans-Christian-Andersen-ville [November 1888].

MY DEAR CHARLES,—Whether I have a penny left in the wide world, I know not, nor shall know, till I get to Honolulu, where I anticipate a devil of an awakening.  It will be from a mighty pleasant dream at least: Tautira being mere Heaven.  But suppose, for the sake of argument, any money to be left in the hands of my painful doer, what is to be done with it?  Save us from exile would be the wise man’s choice, I suppose; for the exile threatens to be eternal.  But yet I am of opinion—in case there should be some dibs in the hand of the P.D., i.e. painful doer; because if there be none, I shall take to my flageolet on the high-road, and work home the best way I can, having previously made away with my family—I am of opinion that if — and his are in the customary state, and you are thinking of an offering, and there should be still some funds over, you would be a real good P.D. to put some in with yours and tak’ the credit o’t, like a wee man!  I know it’s a beastly thing to ask; but it, after all, does no earthly harm, only that much good.  And besides, like enough there’s nothing in the till, and there is an end.  Yet I live here in the full lustre of millions; it is thought I am the richest son of man that has yet been to Tautira: I!—and I am secretly eaten with the fear of lying in pawn, perhaps for the remainder of my days, in San Francisco.  As usual, my colds have much hashed my finances.

Do tell Henley I write this just after having dismissed Ori the sub-chief, in whose house I live, Mrs. Ori, and Pairai, their adopted child, from the evening hour of p. 123music: during which I Publickly (with a k) Blow on the Flageolet.  These are words of truth.  Yesterday I told Ori about W. E. H., counterfeited his playing on the piano and the pipe, and succeeded in sending the six feet four there is of that sub-chief somewhat sadly to his bed; feeling that his was not the genuine article after all.  Ori is exactly like a colonel in the Guards.—I am, dear Charles, ever yours affectionately,

R. L. S.

Tautira, 10th November ’88.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—Our mainmast is dry-rotten, and we are all to the devil; I shall lie in a debtor’s jail.  Never mind, Tautira is first chop.  I am so besotted that I shall put on the back of this my attempt at words to Wandering Willie; if you can conceive at all the difficulty, you will also conceive the vanity with which I regard any kind of result; and whatever mine is like, it has some sense, and Burns’s has none.

Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?
   Hunger my driver, I go where I must.
Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather;
   Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust.
Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree.
   The true word of welcome was spoken in the door—
Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight,
   Kind folks of old, you come again no more.

Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces,
   Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child.
Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland;
   Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild.
Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland,
   Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold.
Lone let it stand, now the friends are all departed,
   The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old.

R. L. S.

November 11th 1888.

One November night, in the village of Tautira, we sat at the high table in the hall of assembly, hearing the natives sing.  It was dark in the hall, and very warm; though at times the land wind blew a little shrewdly through the chinks, and at times, through the larger openings, we could see the moonlight on the lawn.  As the songs arose in the rattling Tahitian chorus, the chief translated here and there a verse.  Farther on in the volume you shall read the songs themselves; and I am in hopes that not you only, but all who can find a savour in the ancient poetry of places, will read them with some pleasure.  You are to conceive us, therefore, in strange circumstances and very pleasing; in a strange land and climate, the most beautiful on earth; surrounded by a foreign race that all travellers have agreed to be the most engaging; and taking a double interest in two foreign arts.

We came forth again at last, in a cloudy moonlight, on the forest lawn which is the street of Tautira.  The Pacific roared outside upon the reef.  Here and there one of the scattered palm-built lodges shone out under the shadow of the wood, the lamplight bursting through the crannies of the wall.  We went homeward slowly, Ori a Ori carrying behind us the lantern and the chairs, properties with which we had just been enacting our part of the distinguished visitor.  It was one of those moments in which minds not altogether churlish recall the names and deplore the absence of congenial friends; and it was your name that first rose upon our lips.  ‘How Symonds would have enjoyed this evening!’ said one, and then another.  The word caught in my mind; I went to bed, and it was still there.  The glittering, frosty solitudes in which your days are cast arose before me: I seemed to see you walking there in the late night, under the pine-trees and the stars; and I received the image with something like remorse.

There is a modern attitude towards fortune; in this place I will not use a graver name.  Staunchly to withstand her buffets and to enjoy with equanimity her favours was the code of the virtuous of old.  Our fathers, it should seem, wondered and doubted how they had merited their misfortunes: we, rather how we have deserved our happiness.  And we stand often abashed and sometimes revolted, at those partialities of fate by which we profit most.  It was so with me on that November night: I felt that our positions should be changed.  It was you, dear Symonds, who should have gone upon that voyage and written this account.  With your rich stores of knowledge, you could have remarked and understood a thousand things of interest and beauty that escaped my ignorance; and the brilliant colours of your style would have carried into a thousand sickrooms the sea air and the strong sun of tropic islands.  It was otherwise decreed.  But suffer me at least to connect you, if only in name and only in the fondness of imagination, with the voyage of the ‘Silver Ship.’

Robert Louis Stevenson.

DEAR SYMONDS,—I send you this (November 11th), the morning of its completion.  If I ever write an account of this voyage, may I place this letter at the beginning?  It represents—I need not tell you, for you too are an artist—a most genuine feeling, which kept me long awake last night; and though perhaps a little elaborate, I think it a good piece of writing.  We are in heaven here.  Do not forget

R. L. S.

Please keep this: I have no perfect copy.

Tautira, on the peninsula of Tahiti.

Tautira, Island of Tahiti [November 1888].

DEAR TOMARCHER,—This is a pretty state of things! seven o’clock and no word of breakfast!  And I was awake a good deal last night, for it was full moon, and they had made a great fire of cocoa-nut husks down by the sea, and as we have no blinds or shutters, this kept my room very bright.  And then the rats had a wedding or a school-feast under my bed.  And then I woke early, and I have nothing to read except Virgil’s Æneid, which is not good fun on an empty stomach, and a Latin dictionary, which is good for naught, and by some humorous accident, your dear papa’s article on Skerryvore.  And I read the whole of that, and very impudent it is, but you must not tell your dear papa I said so, or it might come to a battle in which you might lose either a dear papa or a valued correspondent, or both, which would be prodigal.  And still no breakfast; so I said ‘Let’s write to Tomarcher.’

This is a much better place for children than any I have hitherto seen in these seas.  The girls (and sometimes the boys) play a very elaborate kind of hopscotch.  The boys play horses exactly as we do in Europe; and have very good fun on stilts, trying to knock each other down, in which they do not often succeed.  The children of all ages go to church and are allowed to do what they please, running about the aisles, rolling balls, stealing mamma’s bonnet and publicly sitting on it, and at last going to sleep in the middle of the floor.  I forgot to say that the whips to play horses, and the balls to roll about the church—at least I never saw them used elsewhere—grow ready made on trees; which is rough on toy-shops.  The whips are so good that I wanted to play horses myself; but no such luck! my hair is grey, and I am a great, big, ugly man.  The balls are rather hard, but very light and quite round.  When you grow up and become offensively rich, you can charter a ship in the port of London, and have it come back to you entirely loaded with these balls; when you could satisfy your mind as to their character, and give them away when done with to your uncles and aunts.  But what I really wanted to tell you was this: besides the tree-top toys (Hush-a-by, toy-shop, on the tree-top!), I have seen some real made toys, the first hitherto observed in the South Seas.

This was how.  You are to imagine a four-wheeled gig; one horse; in the front seat two Tahiti natives, in their Sunday clothes, blue coat, white shirt, kilt (a little longer than the Scotch) of a blue stuff with big white or yellow flowers, legs and feet bare; in the back seat me and my wife, who is a friend of yours; under our feet, plenty of lunch and things: among us a great deal of fun in broken Tahitian, one of the natives, the sub-chief of the village, being a great ally of mine.  Indeed we have exchanged names; so that he is now called Rui, the nearest they can come to Louis, for they have no l and no s in their language.  Rui is six feet three in his stockings, and a magnificent man.  We all have straw hats, for the sun is strong.  We drive between the sea, which makes a great noise, and the mountains; the road is cut through a forest mostly of fruit trees, the very creepers, which take the place of our ivy, heavy with a great and delicious fruit, bigger than your head and far nicer, called Barbedine.  Presently we came to a house in a pretty garden, quite by itself, very nicely kept, the doors and windows open, no one about, and no noise but that of the sea.  It looked like a house in a fairy-tale, and just beyond we must ford a river, and there we saw the inhabitants.  Just in the mouth of the river, where it met the sea waves, they were ducking and bathing and screaming together like a covey of birds: seven or eight little naked brown boys and girls as happy as the day was long; and on the banks of the stream beside them, real toys—toy ships, full rigged, and with their sails set, though they were lying in the dust on their beam ends.  And then I knew for sure they were all children in a fairy-story, living alone together in that lonely house with the only toys in all the island; and that I had myself driven, in my four-wheeled gig, into a corner of the fairy-story, and the question was, should I get out again?  But it was all right; I guess only one of the wheels of the gig had got into the fairy-story; and the next jolt the whole thing vanished, and we drove on in our sea-side forest as before, and I have the honour to be Tomarcher’s valued correspondent, Teriitepa, which he was previously known as

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Yacht ‘Casco,’ at Sea, 14th January, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—Twenty days out from Papeete.  Yes, sir, all that, and only (for a guess) in 4° north or at the best 4° 30′, though already the wind seems to smell a little of the North Pole.  My handwriting you must take as you get, for we are speeding along through a nasty swell, and I can only keep my place at the table by means of a foot against the divan, the unoccupied hand meanwhile gripping the ink-bottle.  As we begin (so very slowly) to draw near to seven months of correspondence, we are all in some fear; and I want to have letters written before I shall be plunged into that boiling pot of disagreeables which I constantly expect at Honolulu.  What is needful can be added there.

We were kept two months at Tautira in the house of my dear old friend, Ori a Ori, till both the masts of this invaluable yacht had been repaired.  It was all for the best: Tautira being the most beautiful spot, and its people the most amiable, I have ever found.  Besides which, the climate suited me to the ground; I actually went sea-bathing almost every day, and in our feasts (we are all huge eaters in Taiarapu) have been known to apply four p. 129times for pig.  And then again I got wonderful materials for my book, collected songs and legends on the spot; songs still sung in chorus by perhaps a hundred persons, not two of whom can agree on their translation; legends, on which I have seen half a dozen seniors sitting in conclave and debating what came next.  Once I went a day’s journey to the other side of the island to Tati, the high chief of the Tevas—my chief that is, for I am now a Teva and Teriitera, at your service—to collect more and correct what I had already.  In the meanwhile I got on with my work, almost finished the Master of Ballantrae, which contains more human work than anything of mine but Kidnapped, and wrote the half of another ballad, the Song of Rahero, on a Taiarapu legend of my own clan, sir—not so much fire as the Feast of Famine, but promising to be more even and correct.  But the best fortune of our stay at Tautira was my knowledge of Ori himself, one of the finest creatures extant.  The day of our parting was a sad one.  We deduced from it a rule for travellers: not to stay two months in one place—which is to cultivate regrets.

At last our contemptible ship was ready; to sea we went, bound for Honolulu and the letter-bag, on Christmas Day; and from then to now have experienced every sort of minor misfortune, squalls, calms, contrary winds and seas, pertinacious rains, declining stores, till we came almost to regard ourselves as in the case of Vanderdecken.  Three days ago our luck seemed to improve, we struck a leading breeze, got creditably through the doldrums, and just as we looked to have the N.E. trades and a straight run, the rains and squalls and calms began again about midnight, and this morning, though there is breeze enough to send us along, we are beaten back by an obnoxious swell out of the north.  Here is a page of complaint, when a verse of thanksgiving had perhaps been more in place.  For all this time we must have been skirting past dangerous weather, in the tail and circumference of p. 130hurricanes, and getting only annoyance where we should have had peril, and ill-humour instead of fear.

I wonder if I have managed to give you any news this time, or whether the usual damn hangs over my letter?  ‘The midwife whispered, Be thou dull!’ or at least inexplicit.  Anyway I have tried my best, am exhausted with the effort, and fall back into the land of generalities.  I cannot tell you how often we have planned our arrival at the Monument: two nights ago, the 12th January, we had it all planned out, arrived in the lights and whirl of Waterloo, hailed a hansom, span up Waterloo Road, over the bridge, etc. etc., and hailed the Monument gate in triumph and with indescribable delight.  My dear Custodian, I always think we are too sparing of assurances: Cordelia is only to be excused by Regan and Goneril in the same nursery; I wish to tell you that the longer I live, the more dear do you become to me; nor does my heart own any stronger sentiment.  If the bloody schooner didn’t send me flying in every sort of direction at the same time, I would say better what I feel so much; but really, if you were here, you would not be writing letters, I believe; and even I, though of a more marine constitution, am much perturbed by this bobbery and wish—O ye Gods, how I wish!—that it was done, and we had arrived, and I had Pandora’s Box (my mail bag) in hand, and was in the lively hope of something eatable for dinner instead of salt horse, tinned mutton, duff without any plums, and pie fruit, which now make up our whole repertory.  O Pandora’s Box!  I wonder what you will contain.  As like as not you will contain but little money: if that be so, we shall have to retire to ’Frisco in the Casco, and thence by sea via Panama to Southampton, where we should arrive in April.  I would like fine to see you on the tug: ten years older both of us than the last time you came to welcome Fanny and me to England.  If we have money, however, we shall do a little differently: send the Casco away from Honolulu empty of its high-born lessees, p. 131for that voyage to ’Frisco is one long dead beat in foul and at last in cold weather; stay awhile behind, follow by steamer, cross the States by train, stay awhile in New York on business, and arrive probably by the German Line in Southampton.  But all this is a question of money.  We shall have to lie very dark awhile to recruit our finances: what comes from the book of the cruise, I do not want to touch until the capital is repaid.

R. L. S.

Honolulu, January 1889.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—Here at last I have arrived.  We could not get away from Tahiti till Christmas Day, and then had thirty days of calms and squalls, a deplorable passage.  This has thrown me all out of gear in every way.  I plunge into business.

1.  The Master: Herewith go three more parts.  You see he grows in balk; this making ten already, and I am not yet sure if I can finish it in an eleventh; which shall go to you quam primum—I hope by next mail.

2.  Illustrations to M.  I totally forgot to try to write to Hole.  It was just as well, for I find it impossible to forecast with sufficient precision.  You had better throw off all this and let him have it at once.  Please do: all, and at once: see further; and I should hope he would still be in time for the later numbers.  The three pictures I have received are so truly good that I should bitterly regret having the volume imperfectly equipped.  They are the best illustrations I have seen since I don’t know when.

3.  Money.  To-morrow the mail comes in, and I hope it will bring me money either from you or home, but I will add a word on that point.

4.  My address will be Honolulu—no longer Yacht Casco, which I am packing off—till probably April.

p. 1325.  As soon as I am through with The Master, I shall finish the Game of Bluff—now rechristened The Wrong Box.  This I wish to sell, cash down.  It is of course copyright in the States; and I offer it to you for five thousand dollars.  Please reply on this by return.  Also please tell the typewriter who was so good as to be amused by our follies that I am filled with admiration for his piece of work.

6.  Master again.  Please see that I haven’t the name of the Governor of New York wrong (1764 is the date) in part ten.  I have no book of reference to put me right.  Observe you now have up to August inclusive in hand, so you should begin to feel happy.

Is this all?  I wonder, and fear not.  Henry the Trader has not yet turned up: I hope he may to-morrow, when we expect a mail.  Not one word of business have I received either from the States or England, nor anything in the shape of coin; which leaves me in a fine uncertainty and quite penniless on these islands.  H.M. [132] (who is a gentleman of a courtly order and much tinctured with letters) is very polite; I may possibly ask for the position of palace doorkeeper.  My voyage has been a singular mixture of good and ill-fortune.  As far as regards interest and material, the fortune has been admirable; as far as regards time, money, and impediments of all kinds, from squalls and calms to rotten masts and sprung spars, simply detestable.  I hope you will be interested to hear of two volumes on the wing.  The cruise itself, you are to know, will make a big volume with appendices; some of it will first appear as (what they call) letters in some of M’Clure’s papers.  I believe the book when ready will have a fair measure of serious interest: I have had great fortune in finding old songs and ballads and stories, for instance, and have many singular instances of life in the last few years among these islands.

The second volume is of ballads.  You know Ticonderoga.  p. 133I have written another: The Feast of Famine, a Marquesan story.  A third is half done: The Song of Rahero, a genuine Tahitian legend.  A fourth dances before me.  A Hawaiian fellow this, The Priest’s Drought, or some such name.  If, as I half suspect, I get enough subjects out of the islands, Ticonderoga shall be suppressed, and we’ll call the volume South Sea Ballads.  In health, spirits, renewed interest in life, and, I do believe, refreshed capacity for work, the cruise has proved a wise folly.  Still we’re not home, and (although the friend of a crowned head) are penniless upon these (as one of my correspondents used to call them) ‘lovely but fatil islands.’  By the way, who wrote the Lion of the Nile?  My dear sir, that is Something Like.  Overdone in bits, it has a true thought and a true ring of language.  Beg the anonymous from me, to delete (when he shall republish) the two last verses, and end on ‘the lion of the Nile.’  One Lampman has a good sonnet on a ‘Winter Evening’ in, I think, the same number: he seems ill named, but I am tempted to hope a man is not always answerable for his name. [133]  For instance, you would think you knew mine.  No such matter.  It is—at your service and Mr. Scribner’s and that of all of the faithful—Teriitera (pray pronounce Tayree-Tayra) or (gallicé) Téri-téra.

R. L. S.

More when the mail shall come.

I am an idiot.  I want to be clear on one point.  Some of Hole’s drawings must of course be too late; and yet they seem to me so excellent I would fain have the lot complete.  It is one thing for you to pay for drawings which are to appear in that soul-swallowing machine, your magazine: quite another if they are only to illustrate a volume.  I wish you to take a brisk (even a fiery) decision on the point; and let Hole know.  To resume p. 134my desultory song, I desire you would carry the same fire (hereinbefore suggested) into your decision on the Wrong Box; for in my present state of benighted ignorance as to my affairs for the last seven months—I know not even whether my house or my mother’s house have been let—I desire to see something definite in front of me—outside the lot of palace doorkeeper.  I believe the said Wrong Box is a real lark; in which, of course, I may be grievously deceived; but the typewriter is with me.  I may also be deceived as to the numbers of The Master now going and already gone; but to me they seem First Chop, sir, First Chop.  I hope I shall pull off that damned ending; but it still depresses me: this is your doing, Mr. Burlingame: you would have it there and then, and I fear it—I fear that ending.

R. L. S.

Honolulu, February 8th, 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—Here we are at Honolulu, and have dismissed the yacht, and lie here till April anyway, in a fine state of haze, which I am yet in hopes some letter of yours (still on the way) may dissipate.  No money, and not one word as to money!  However, I have got the yacht paid off in triumph, I think; and though we stay here impignorate, it should not be for long, even if you bring us no extra help from home.  The cruise has been a great success, both as to matter, fun, and health; and yet, Lord, man! we’re pleased to be ashore!  Yon was a very fine voyage from Tahiti up here, but—the dry land’s a fine place too, and we don’t mind squalls any longer, and eh, man, that’s a great thing.  Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, thou hast done me no appreciable harm beyond a few grey hairs!  Altogether, this foolhardy venture is achieved; and if I have but nine months of life and any kind of health, I shall have both eaten my cake and got it back again with usury.  But, man, there have p. 135been days when I felt guilty, and thought I was in no position for the head of a house.

Your letter and accounts are doubtless at S. F., and will reach me in course.  My wife is no great shakes; she is the one who has suffered most.  My mother has had a Huge Old Time; Lloyd is first chop; I so well that I do not know myself—sea-bathing, if you please, and what is far more dangerous, entertaining and being entertained by His Majesty here, who is a very fine intelligent fellow, but O, Charles! what a crop for the drink!  He carries it, too, like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders.  We calculated five bottles of champagne in three hours and a half (afternoon), and the sovereign quite presentable, although perceptibly more dignified at the end. . . .

The extraordinary health I enjoy and variety of interests I find among these islands would tempt me to remain here; only for Lloyd, who is not well placed in such countries for a permanency; and a little for Colvin, to whom I feel I owe a sort of filial duty.  And these two considerations will no doubt bring me back—to go to bed again—in England.—Yours ever affectionately,

R. L. S.

Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, February 1889.

MY DEAR BOB,—My extremely foolhardy venture is practically over.  How foolhardy it was I don’t think I realised.  We had a very small schooner, and, like most yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan.  The waters we sailed in are, of course, entirely unlighted, and very badly charted; in the Dangerous Archipelago, through which we were fools enough to go, we were perfectly in ignorance of where we were for a whole night and half the next day, and this in the midst of p. 136invisible islands and rapid and variable currents; and we were lucky when we found our whereabouts at last.  We have twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls: once, as I came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit coamings and running down the companion like a brook to meet me; at that same moment the foresail sheet jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the only occasion on the cruise that ever I set a hand to a rope, but I worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of hæmorrhage better than the certainty of drowning.  Another time I saw a rather singular thing: our whole ship’s company as pale as paper from the captain to the cook; we had a black squall astern on the port side and a white squall ahead to starboard; the complication passed off innocuous, the black squall only fetching us with its tail, and the white one slewing off somewhere else.  Twice we were a long while (days) in the close vicinity of hurricane weather, but again luck prevailed, and we saw none of it.  These are dangers incident to these seas and small craft.  What was an amazement, and at the same time a powerful stroke of luck, both our masts were rotten, and we found it out—I was going to say in time, but it was stranger and luckier than that.  The head of the mainmast hung over so that hands were afraid to go to the helm; and less than three weeks before—I am not sure it was more than a fortnight—we had been nearly twelve hours beating off the lee shore of Eimeo (or Moorea, next island to Tahiti) in half a gale of wind with a violent head sea: she would neither tack nor wear once, and had to be boxed off with the mainsail—you can imagine what an ungodly show of kites we carried—and yet the mast stood.  The very day after that, in the southern bight of Tahiti, we had a near squeak, the wind suddenly coming calm; the reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf!  The pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our rescue.  My wife, hearing the p. 137order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, ‘Isn’t that nice?  We shall soon be ashore!’  Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity.  Our voyage up here was most disastrous—calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season, when even the hopeful builder and owner of the yacht had pronounced these seas unfit for her.  We ran out of food, and were quite given up for lost in Honolulu: people had ceased to speak to Belle [137] about the Casco, as a deadly subject.

But the perils of the deep were part of the programme; and though I am very glad to be done with them for a while and comfortably ashore, where a squall does not matter a snuff to any one, I feel pretty sure I shall want to get to sea again ere long.  The dreadful risk I took was financial, and double-headed.  First, I had to sink a lot of money in the cruise, and if I didn’t get health, how was I to get it back?  I have got health to a wonderful extent; and as I have the most interesting matter for my book, bar accidents, I ought to get all I have laid out and a profit.  But, second (what I own I never considered till too late), there was the danger of collisions, of damages and heavy repairs, of disablement, towing, and salvage; indeed, the cruise might have turned round and cost me double.  Nor will this danger be quite over till I hear the yacht is in San Francisco; for though I have shaken the dust of her deck from my feet, I fear (as a point of law) she is still mine till she gets there.

From my point of view, up to now the cruise has been a wonderful success.  I never knew the world was so amusing.  On the last voyage we had grown so used to sea-life that no one wearied, though it lasted a full month, except Fanny, who is always ill.  All the time our visits p. 138to the islands have been more like dreams than realities: the people, the life, the beachcombers, the old stories and songs I have picked up, so interesting; the climate, the scenery, and (in some places) the women, so beautiful.  The women are handsomest in Tahiti, the men in the Marquesas; both as fine types as can be imagined.  Lloyd reminds me, I have not told you one characteristic incident of the cruise from a semi-naval point of view.  One night we were going ashore in Anaho Bay; the most awful noise on deck; the breakers distinctly audible in the cabin; and there I had to sit below, entertaining in my best style a negroid native chieftain, much the worse for rum!  You can imagine the evening’s pleasure.

This naval report on cruising in the South Seas would be incomplete without one other trait.  On our voyage up here I came one day into the dining-room, the hatch in the floor was open, the ship’s boy was below with a baler, and two of the hands were carrying buckets as for a fire; this meant that the pumps had ceased working.

One stirring day was that in which we sighted Hawaii.  It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, foresail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her lee rail under water and flew.  The swell, the heaviest I have ever been out in—I tried in vain to estimate the height, at least fifteen feet—came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind.  We had the best hand—old Louis—at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, and had noble luck, for it never caught us once.  At times it seemed we must have it; Louis would look over his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the cockpit coamings.  I never remember anything more delightful and exciting.  Pretty soon after we were lying absolutely becalmed under the lee of Hawaii, of which we had been warned; and the captain never confessed he had done it p. 139on purpose, but when accused, he smiled.  Really, I suppose he did quite right, for we stood committed to a dangerous race, and to bring her to the wind would have been rather a heart-sickening manœuvre.

R. L. S.

Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, February 8th, 1889.

DEAR SIR,—I thank you—from the midst of such a flurry as you can imagine, with seven months’ accumulated correspondence on my table—for your two friendly and clever letters.  Pray write me again.  I shall be home in May or June, and not improbably shall come to Paris in the summer.  Then we can talk; or in the interval I may be able to write, which is to-day out of the question.  Pray take a word from a man of crushing occupations, and count it as a volume.  Your little conte is delightful.  Ah yes, you are right, I love the eighteenth century; and so do you, and have not listened to its voice in vain.—The Hunted One,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Honolulu, 8th March 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—At last I have the accounts: the Doer has done excellently, and in the words of —, ‘I reciprocate every step of your behaviour.’ . .  I send a letter for Bob in your care, as I don’t know his Liverpool address, by which (for he is to show you part of it) you will see we have got out of this adventure—or hope to have—with wonderful fortune.  I have the retrospective horrors on me when I think of the liabilities I incurred; but, thank God, I think I’m in port again, and I have p. 140found one climate in which I can enjoy life.  Even Honolulu is too cold for me; but the south isles were a heaven upon earth to a puir, catarrhal party like Johns’one.  We think, as Tahiti is too complete a banishment, to try Madeira.  It’s only a week from England, good communications, and I suspect in climate and scenery not unlike our dear islands; in people, alas! there can be no comparison.  But friends could go, and I could come in summer, so I should not be quite cut off.

Lloyd and I have finished a story, The Wrong Box.  If it is not funny, I am sure I do not know what is.  I have split over writing it.  Since I have been here, I have been toiling like a galley slave: three numbers of The Master to rewrite, five chapters of the Wrong Box to write and rewrite, and about five hundred lines of a narrative poem to write, rewrite, and re-rewrite.  Now I have The Master waiting me for its continuation, two numbers more; when that’s done, I shall breathe.  This spasm of activity has been chequered with champagne parties: Happy and Glorious, Hawaii Ponoi paua: kou moi—(Native Hawaiians, dote upon your monarch!) Hawaiian God save the King.  (In addition to my other labours, I am learning the language with a native moonshee.)  Kalakaua is a terrible companion; a bottle of fizz is like a glass of sherry to him, he thinks nothing of five or six in an afternoon as a whet for dinner.  You should see a photograph of our party after an afternoon with H. H. M.: my! what a crew!—Yours ever affectionately,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Honolulu [March 1889].

MY DEAR JAMES,—Yes—I own up—I am untrue to friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to civilisation.  I am not coming home for another year.  There it is, cold and bald, and now you won’t believe in p. 141me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me.  But look here, and judge me tenderly.  I have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years.  And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like.  In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more.  Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate: perchance, of an American Missionary.  My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (tant bien que mal) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James’s. [141]  I p. 142jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough, sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, ‘the highly popular M.P. of Tautira.’  My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient.  I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even —? and for me, I would rather have received it than written Redgauntlet or the Sixth Æneid.  All told, if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial expression) not been writ in vain.  It would seem from this that I have been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact been both.  A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all, but yet a little; and the little makes me proud, and all the rest ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the ancient man than him of to-day!

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.  And to curry favour with him, I wish I could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some while p. 143yet.  As soon as I am sure, you shall hear.  All are fairly well—the wife, your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Honolulu, April 2nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—I am beginning to be ashamed of writing on to you without the least acknowledgment, like a tramp; but I do not care—I am hardened; and whatever be the cause of your silence, I mean to write till all is blue.  I am outright ashamed of my news, which is that we are not coming home for another year.  I cannot but hope it may continue the vast improvement of my health: I think it good for Fanny and Lloyd; and we have all a taste for this wandering and dangerous life.  My mother I send home, to my relief, as this part of our cruise will be (if we can carry it out) rather difficult in places.  Here is the idea: about the middle of June (unless the Boston Board objects) we sail from Honolulu in the missionary ship (barquentine auxiliary steamer) Morning Star: she takes us through the Gilberts and Marshalls, and drops us (this is my great idea) on Ponape, one of the volcanic islands of the Carolines.  Here we stay marooned among a doubtful population, with a Spanish vice-governor and five native kings, and a sprinkling of missionaries all at loggerheads, on the chance of fetching a passage to Sydney in a trader, a labour ship, or (maybe, but this appears too bright) a ship of war.  If we can’t get the Morning Star (and the Board has many reasons that I can see for refusing its permission) I mean to try to fetch Fiji, hire a schooner there, do the Fijis and Friendlies, hit the course of the Richmond at Tonga Tabu, make back by Tahiti, and so to S. F., and home: perhaps in June 1890.  For the latter part of the cruise will likely be the same in p. 144either case.  You can see for yourself how much variety and adventure this promises, and that it is not devoid of danger at the best; but if we can pull it off in safety, gives me a fine book of travel, and Lloyd a fine lecture and diorama, which should vastly better our finances.

I feel as if I were untrue to friendship; believe me, Colvin, when I look forward to this absence of another year, my conscience sinks at thought of the Monument; but I think you will pardon me if you consider how much this tropical weather mends my health.  Remember me as I was at home, and think of me sea-bathing and walking about, as jolly as a sandboy: you will own the temptation is strong; and as the scheme, bar fatal accidents, is bound to pay into the bargain, sooner or later, it seems it would be madness to come home now, with an imperfect book, no illustrations to speak of, no diorama, and perhaps fall sick again by autumn.  I do not think I delude myself when I say the tendency to catarrh has visibly diminished.

It is a singular tiring that as I was packing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore, I came on the prophecies of a drunken Highland sibyl, when I was seventeen.  She said I was to be very happy, to visit America, and to be much upon the sea.  It seems as if it were coming true with a vengeance.  Also, do you remember my strong, old, rooted belief that I shall die by drowning?  I don’t want that to come true, though it is an easy death; but it occurs to me oddly, with these long chances in front.  I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling; and yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling.  Fine, clean emotions; a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging; there is upon the whole no better life.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

[Honolulu, April 1889.]

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—This is to announce the most prodigious change of programme.  I have seen so much of the South Seas that I desire to see more, and I get so much health here that I dread a return to our vile climates.  I have applied accordingly to the missionary folk to let me go round in the Morning Star; and if the Boston Board should refuse, I shall get somehow to Fiji, hire a trading schooner, and see the Fijis and Friendlies and Samoa.  He would be a South Seayer, Mr. Burlingame.  Of course, if I go in the Morning Star, I see all the eastern (or western?) islands.

Before I sail, I shall make out to let you have the last of The Master: though I tell you it sticks!—and I hope to have had some proofs forbye, of the verses anyway.  And now to business.

I want (if you can find them) in the British sixpenny edition, if not, in some equally compact and portable shape—Seaside Library, for instance—the Waverley Novels entire, or as entire as you can get ’em, and the following of Marryat: Phantom Ship, Peter Simple, Percival Keene, Privateersman, Children of the New Forest, Frank Mildmay, Newton Forster, Dog Fiend (Snarleyyow).  Also Midshipman Easy, Kingsburn, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Motley’s Dutch Republic, Lang’s Letters on Literature, a complete set of my works, Jenkin, in duplicate; also Familiar Studies, ditto.

I have to thank you for the accounts, which are satisfactory indeed, and for the cheque for $1000.  Another account will have come and gone before I see you.  I hope it will be equally roseate in colour.  I am quite worked out, and this cursed end of The Master hangs over me like the arm of the gallows; but it is always darkest before dawn, and no doubt the clouds will soon rise; but it is a p. 146difficult thing to write, above all in Mackellarese; and I cannot yet see my way clear.  If I pull this off, The Master will be a pretty good novel or I am the more deceived; and even if I don’t pull it off, it’ll still have some stuff in it.

We shall remain here until the middle of June anyway; but my mother leaves for Europe early in May.  Hence our mail should continue to come here; but not hers.  I will let you know my next address, which will probably be Sydney.  If we get on the Morning Star, I propose at present to get marooned on Ponape, and take my chance of getting a passage to Australia.  It will leave times and seasons mighty vague, and the cruise is risky; but I shall know something of the South Seas when it is done, or else the South Seas will contain all there is of me.  It should give me a fine book of travels, anyway.

Low will probably come and ask some dollars of you.  Pray let him have them, they are for outfit.  O, another complete set of my books should go to Captain A. H. Otis, care of Dr. Merritt, Yacht Casco, Oakland, Cal.  In haste,

R. L. S.

Honolulu, April 6th, 1889.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,—Nobody writes a better letter than my Gamekeeper: so gay, so pleasant, so engagingly particular, answering (by some delicate instinct) all the questions she suggests.  It is a shame you should get such a poor return as I can make, from a mind essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary.  I would let the paper-cutter take my place; but I am sorry to say the little wooden seaman did after the manner of seamen, and deserted in the Societies.  The place he seems to have stayed at—seems, for his absence was not observed till we were near the Equator—was Tautira, and, I assure you, he displayed good taste, Tautira being as ‘nigh hand heaven’ as a paper-cutter or anybody has a right to expect.

p. 147I think all our friends will be very angry with us, and I give the grounds of their probable displeasure bluntly—we are not coming home for another year.  My mother returns next month.  Fanny, Lloyd, and I push on again among the islands on a trading schooner, the Equator—first for the Gilbert group, which we shall have an opportunity to explore thoroughly; then, if occasion serve, to the Marshalls and Carolines; and if occasion (or money) fail, to Samoa, and back to Tahiti.  I own we are deserters, but we have excuses.  You cannot conceive how these climates agree with the wretched house-plant of Skerryvore: he wonders to find himself sea-bathing, and cutting about the world loose, like a grown-up person.  They agree with Fanny too, who does not suffer from her rheumatism, and with Lloyd also.  And the interest of the islands is endless; and the sea, though I own it is a fearsome place, is very delightful.  We had applied for places in the American missionary ship, the Morning Star, but this trading schooner is a far preferable idea, giving us more time and a thousandfold more liberty; so we determined to cut off the missionaries with a shilling.

The Sandwich Islands do not interest us very much; we live here, oppressed with civilisation, and look for good things in the future.  But it would surprise you if you came out to-night from Honolulu (all shining with electric lights, and all in a bustle from the arrival of the mail, which is to carry you these lines) and crossed the long wooden causeway along the beach, and came out on the road through Kapiolani park, and seeing a gate in the palings, with a tub of gold-fish by the wayside, entered casually in.  The buildings stand in three groups by the edge of the beach, where an angry little spitfire sea continually spirts and thrashes with impotent irascibility, the big seas breaking further out upon the reef.  The first is a small house, with a very large summer parlour, or lanai, as they call it here, roofed, but practically open.  There you will find the lamps burning and the family p. 148sitting about the table, dinner just done: my mother, my wife, Lloyd, Belle, my wife’s daughter, Austin her child, and to-night (by way of rarity) a guest.  All about the walls our South Sea curiosities, war clubs, idols, pearl shells, stone axes, etc.; and the walls are only a small part of a lanai, the rest being glazed or latticed windows, or mere open space.  You will see there no sign of the Squire, however; and being a person of a humane disposition, you will only glance in over the balcony railing at the merry-makers in the summer parlour, and proceed further afield after the Exile.  You look round, there is beautiful green turf, many trees of an outlandish sort that drop thorns—look out if your feet are bare; but I beg your pardon, you have not been long enough in the South Seas—and many oleanders in full flower.  The next group of buildings is ramshackle, and quite dark; you make out a coach-house door, and look in—only some cocoanuts; you try round to the left and come to the sea front, where Venus and the moon are making luminous tracks on the water, and a great swell rolls and shines on the outer reef; and here is another door—all these places open from the outside—and you go in, and find photography, tubs of water, negatives steeping, a tap, and a chair and an inkbottle, where my wife is supposed to write; round a little further, a third door, entering which you find a picture upon the easel and a table sticky with paints; a fourth door admits you to a sort of court, where there is a hen sitting—I believe on a fallacious egg.  No sign of the Squire in all this.  But right opposite the studio door you have observed a third little house, from whose open door lamplight streams and makes hay of the strong moonlight shadows.  You had supposed it made no part of the grounds, for a fence runs round it lined with oleander; but as the Squire is nowhere else, is it not just possible he may be here?  It is a grim little wooden shanty; cobwebs bedeck it; friendly mice inhabit its recesses; the mailed cockroach walks upon the wall; so p. 149also, I regret to say, the scorpion.  Herein are two pallet beds, two mosquito curtains, strung to the pitch-boards of the roof, two tables laden with books and manuscripts, three chairs, and, in one of the beds, the Squire busy writing to yourself, as it chances, and just at this moment somewhat bitten by mosquitoes.  He has just set fire to the insect powder, and will be all right in no time; but just now he contemplates large white blisters, and would like to scratch them, but knows better.  The house is not bare; it has been inhabited by Kanakas, and—you know what children are!—the bare wood walls are pasted over with pages from the Graphic, Harper’s Weekly, etc.  The floor is matted, and I am bound to say the matting is filthy.  There are two windows and two doors, one of which is condemned; on the panels of that last a sheet of paper is pinned up, and covered with writing.  I cull a few plums:—

What do you think this is?  Simply life in the South Seas foreshortened.  These are a few of our desiderata for the next trip, which we jot down as they occur.

There, I have really done my best and tried to send something like a letter—one letter in return for all your dozens.  Pray remember us all to yourself, Mrs. Boodle, and the rest of your house.  I do hope your mother will be better when this comes.  I shall write and give you a new address when I have made up my mind as to the most probable, and I do beg you will continue to write from time to time and give us airs from home.  To-morrow—think of it—I must be off by a quarter to eight to drive in to the palace and breakfast with his Hawaiian p. 150Majesty at 8.30: I shall be dead indeed.  Please give my news to Scott, I trust he is better; give him my warm regards.  To you we all send all kinds of things, and I am the absentee Squire,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Honolulu, April 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—As usual, your letter is as good as a cordial, and I thank you for it, and all your care, kindness, and generous and thoughtful friendship, from my heart.  I was truly glad to hear a word of Colvin, whose long silence has terrified me; and glad to hear that you condoned the notion of my staying longer in the South Seas, for I have decided in that sense.  The first idea was to go in the Morning Star, missionary ship; but now I have found a trading schooner, the Equator, which is to call for me here early in June and carry us through the Gilberts.  What will happen then, the Lord knows.  My mother does not accompany us: she leaves here for home early in May, and you will hear of us from her; but not, I imagine, anything more definite.  We shall get dumped on Butaritari, and whether we manage to go on to the Marshalls and Carolines, or whether we fall back on Samoa, Heaven must decide; but I mean to fetch back into the course of the Richmond—(to think you don’t know what the Richmond is!—the steamer of the Eastern South Seas, joining New Zealand, Tongatabu, the Samoas, Taheite, and Rarotonga, and carrying by last advices sheep in the saloon!)—into the course of the Richmond and make Taheite again on the home track.  Would I like to see the Scots Observer?  Wouldn’t I not?  But whaur?  I’m direckit at space.  They have nae post offishes at the Gilberts, and as for the Car’lines!  Ye see, Mr. Baxter, we’re no just in the punkshewal centre o’ civ’lisation.  But pile them up for me, and when I’ve p. 151decided on an address, I’ll let you ken, and ye’ll can send them stavin’ after me.—Ever your affectionate,

R. L. S.

Honolulu, 10th May 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—I am appalled to gather from your last just to hand that you have felt so much concern about the letter.  Pray dismiss it from your mind.  But I think you scarce appreciate how disagreeable it is to have your private affairs and private unguarded expressions getting into print.  It would soon sicken any one of writing letters.  I have no doubt that letter was very wisely selected, but it just shows how things crop up.  There was a raging jealousy between the two yachts; our captain was nearly in a fight over it.  However, no more; and whatever you think, my dear fellow, do not suppose me angry with you or —; although I was annoyed at the circumstance—a very different thing.  But it is difficult to conduct life by letter, and I continually feel I may be drifting into some matter of offence, in which my heart takes no part.

I must now turn to a point of business.  This new cruise of ours is somewhat venturesome; and I think it needful to warn you not to be in a hurry to suppose us dead.  In these ill-charted seas, it is quite on the cards we might be cast on some unvisited, or very rarely visited, island; that there we might lie for a long time, even years, unheard of; and yet turn up smiling at the hinder end.  So do not let me be ‘rowpit’ till you get some certainty we have gone to Davie Jones in a squall, or graced the feast of some barbarian in the character of Long Pig.

p. 152I have just been a week away alone on the lee coast of Hawaii, the only white creature in many miles, riding five and a half hours one day, living with a native, seeing four lepers shipped off to Molokai, hearing native causes, and giving my opinion as amicus curiæ as to the interpretation of a statute in English; a lovely week among God’s best—at least God’s sweetest works—Polynesians.  It has bettered me greatly.  If I could only stay there the time that remains, I could get my work done and be happy; but the care of my family keeps me in vile Honolulu, where I am always out of sorts, amidst heat and cold and cesspools and beastly haoles. [152]  What is a haole?  You are one; and so, I am sorry to say, am I.  After so long a dose of whites, it was a blessing to get among Polynesians again even for a week.

Well, Charles, there are waur haoles than yoursel’, I’ll say that for ye; and trust before I sail I shall get another letter with more about yourself.—Ever your affectionate friend

R. L. S.

Honolulu, (about) 20th May ’89.

MY DEAR LOW,—. . . The goods have come; many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.—I have at length finished The Master; it has been a sore cross to me; but now he is buried, his body’s under hatches,—his soul, if there is any hell to go to, gone to hell; and I forgive him: it is harder to forgive Burlingame for having induced me to begin the publication, or myself for suffering the induction.—Yes, I think Hole has done finely; it will be one of the most adequately illustrated books of p. 153our generation; he gets the note, he tells the story—my story: I know only one failure—the Master standing on the beach.—You must have a letter for me at Sydney—till further notice.  Remember me to Mrs. Will. H., the godlike sculptor, and any of the faithful.  If you want to cease to be a republican, see my little Kaiulani, as she goes through—but she is gone already.  You will die a red, I wear the colours of that little royal maiden, Nous allons chanter à la ronde, si vous voulez! only she is not blonde by several chalks, though she is but a half-blood, and the wrong half Edinburgh Scots like mysel’.  But, O Low, I love the Polynesian: this civilisation of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast: who has his beauties in spite of Zola and Co.  As usual, here is a whole letter with no news: I am a bloodless, inhuman dog; and no doubt Zola is a better correspondent.—Long live your fine old English admiral—yours, I mean—the U.S.A. one at Samoa; I wept tears and loved myself and mankind when I read of him: he is not too much civilised.  And there was Gordon, too; and there are others, beyond question.  But if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village; and drink that warm, light vin du pays of human affection, and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you—I will not gush, for I am now in my fortieth year, which seems highly unjust, but there it is, Mr. Low, and the Lord enlighten your affectionate

R. L. S.

Kalawao, Molokai [May 1889].

DEAR FANNY,—I had a lovely sail up.  Captain Cameron and Mr. Gilfillan, both born in the States, yet the first still p. 154with a strong Highland, and the second still with a strong Lowland accent, were good company; the night was warm, the victuals plain but good.  Mr. Gilfillan gave me his berth, and I slept well, though I heard the sisters sick in the next stateroom, poor souls.  Heavy rolling woke me in the morning; I turned in all standing, so went right on the upper deck.  The day was on the peep out of a low morning bank, and we were wallowing along under stupendous cliffs.  As the lights brightened, we could see certain abutments and buttresses on their front where wood clustered and grass grew brightly.  But the whole brow seemed quite impassable, and my heart sank at the sight.  Two thousand feet of rock making 19° (the Captain guesses) seemed quite beyond my powers.  However, I had come so far; and, to tell you the truth, I was so cowed with fear and disgust that I dared not go back on the adventure in the interests of my own self-respect.  Presently we came up with the leper promontory: lowland, quite bare and bleak and harsh, a little town of wooden houses, two churches, a landing-stair, all unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out on the south.  Our lepers were sent on the first boat, about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one white man, leaving a large grown family behind him in Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sisters and myself.  I do not know how it would have been with me had the sisters not been there.  My horror of the horrible is about my weakest point; but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and when I found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little crushed to be there so uselessly.  I thought it was a sin and a shame she should feel unhappy; I turned round to her, and said something like this: ‘Ladies, God Himself is here to give you welcome.  I’m sure it is good for me to be beside you; I hope it will be blessed to me; I thank you for p. 155myself and the good you do me.’  It seemed to cheer her up; but indeed I had scarce said it when we were at the landing-stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of (God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human flesh, waiting to receive the sisters and the new patients.

Every hand was offered: I had gloves, but I had made up my mind on the boat’s voyage not to give my hand; that seemed less offensive than the gloves.  So the sisters and I went up among that crew, and presently I got aside (for I felt I had no business there) and set off on foot across the promontory, carrying my wrap and the camera.  All horror was quite gone from me: to see these dread creatures smile and look happy was beautiful.  On my way through Kalaupapa I was exchanging cheerful alohas with the patients coming galloping over on their horses; I was stopping to gossip at house-doors; I was happy, only ashamed of myself that I was here for no good.  One woman was pretty, and spoke good English, and was infinitely engaging and (in the old phrase) towardly; she thought I was the new white patient; and when she found I was only a visitor, a curious change came in her face and voice—the only sad thing, morally sad, I mean—that I met that morning.  But for all that, they tell me none want to leave.  Beyond Kalaupapa the houses became rare; dry stone dykes, grassy, stony land, one sick pandanus; a dreary country; from overhead in the little clinging wood shogs of the pali chirruping of birds fell; the low sun was right in my face; the trade blew pure and cool and delicious; I felt as right as ninepence, and stopped and chatted with the patients whom I still met on their horses, with not the least disgust.  About half-way over, I met the superintendent (a leper) with a horse for me, and O, wasn’t I glad!  But the horse was one of those curious, dogged, cranky brutes that always dully want to go somewhere else, and my traffic with him completed my crushing fatigue.  I got to the guest-house, an empty house with several rooms, kitchen, p. 156bath, etc.  There was no one there, and I let the horse go loose in the garden, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep.

Dr. Swift woke me and gave me breakfast, then I came back and slept again while he was at the dispensary, and he woke me for dinner; and I came back and slept again, and he woke me about six for supper; and then in about an hour I felt tired again, and came up to my solitary guest-house, played the flageolet, and am now writing to you.  As yet, you see, I have seen nothing of the settlement, and my crushing fatigue (though I believe that was moral and a measure of my cowardice) and the doctor’s opinion make me think the pali hopeless.  ‘You don’t look a strong man,’ said the doctor; ‘but are you sound?’  I told him the truth; then he said it was out of the question, and if I were to get up at all, I must be carried up.  But, as it seems, men as well as horses continually fall on this ascent: the doctor goes up with a change of clothes—it is plain that to be carried would in itself be very fatiguing to both mind and body; and I should then be at the beginning of thirteen miles of mountain road to be ridden against time.  How should I come through?  I hope you will think me right in my decision: I mean to stay, and shall not be back in Honolulu till Saturday, June first.  You must all do the best you can to make ready.

Dr. Swift has a wife and an infant son, beginning to toddle and run, and they live here as composed as brick and mortar—at least the wife does, a Kentucky German, a fine enough creature, I believe, who was quite amazed at the sisters shedding tears!  How strange is mankind!  Gilfillan too, a good fellow I think, and far from a stupid, kept up his hard Lowland Scottish talk in the boat while the sister was covering her face; but I believe he knew, and did it (partly) in embarrassment, and part perhaps in mistaken kindness.  And that was one reason, too, why I made my speech to them.  Partly, too, I did it, because I was ashamed to do so, and remembered one of my p. 157golden rules, ‘When you are ashamed to speak, speak up at once.’  But, mind you, that rule is only golden with strangers; with your own folks, there are other considerations.  This is a strange place to be in.  A bell has been sounded at intervals while I wrote, now all is still but a musical humming of the sea, not unlike the sound of telegraph wires; the night is quite cool and pitch dark, with a small fine rain; one light over in the leper settlement, one cricket whistling in the garden, my lamp here by my bedside, and my pen cheeping between my inky fingers.

Next day, lovely morning, slept all night, 80° in the shade, strong, sweet Anaho trade-wind.

Louis.

Honolulu, June 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—I am just home after twelve days journey to Molokai, seven of them at the leper settlement, where I can only say that the sight of so much courage, cheerfulness, and devotion strung me too high to mind the infinite pity and horror of the sights.  I used to ride over from Kalawao to Kalaupapa (about three miles across the promontory, the cliff-wall, ivied with forest and yet inaccessible from steepness, on my left), go to the Sisters’ home, which is a miracle of neatness, play a game of croquet with seven leper girls (90° in the shade), got a little old-maid meal served me by the Sisters, and ride home again, tired enough, but not too tired.  The girls have all dolls, and love dressing them.  You who know so many ladies delicately clad, and they who know so many dressmakers, please make it known it would be an acceptable gift to send scraps for doll dressmaking to the Reverend Sister Maryanne, Bishop Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaiian Islands.

I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories p. 158that cannot be repeated: yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement.  A horror of moral beauty broods over the place: that’s like bad Victor Hugo, but it is the only way I can express the sense that lived with me all these days.  And this even though it was in great part Catholic, and my sympathies flew never with so much difficulty as towards Catholic virtues.  The pass-book kept with heaven stirs me to anger and laughter.  One of the sisters calls the place ‘the ticket office to heaven.’  Well, what is the odds?  They do their darg and do it with kindness and efficiency incredible; and we must take folk’s virtues as we find them, and love the better part.  Of old Damien, whose weaknesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more.  It was a European peasant: dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour and fundamental good-humour: convince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of insult) and he would undo what he had done and like his corrector better.  A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that.  The place as regards scenery is grand, gloomy, and bleak.  Mighty mountain walls descending sheer along the whole face of the island into a sea unusually deep; the front of the mountain ivied and furred with clinging forest, one viridescent cliff: about half-way from east to west, the low, bare, stony promontory edged in between the cliff and the ocean; the two little towns (Kalawao and Kalaupapa) seated on either side of it, as bare almost as bathing machines upon a beach; and the population—gorgons and chimaeras dire.  All this tear of the nerves I bore admirably; and the day after I got away, rode twenty miles along the opposite coast and up into the mountains: they call it twenty, I am doubtful of the figures: I should guess it nearer twelve; but let me take credit for what residents allege; and I was riding again the day after, so I need p. 159say no more about health.  Honolulu does not agree with me at all: I am always out of sorts there, with slight headache, blood to the head, etc.  I had a good deal of work to do and did it with miserable difficulty; and yet all the time I have been gaining strength, as you see, which is highly encouraging.  By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: names of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry,—never was so generous a farrago.  I am going down now to get the story of a shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an island with a murderer: there is a specimen.  The Pacific is a strange place; the nineteenth century only exists there in spots: all round, it is a no man’s land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes.

It is good of you to let me stay longer, but if I had known how ill you were, I should be now on my way home.  I had chartered my schooner and made all arrangements before (at last) we got definite news.  I feel highly guilty; I should be back to insult and worry you a little.  Our address till further notice is to be c/o R. Towns and Co., Sydney.  That is final: I only got the arrangement made yesterday; but you may now publish it abroad.—Yours ever,

R. L. S.

Honolulu, H.I., June 13th, 1889.

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,—I get sad news of you here at my offsetting for further voyages: I wish I could say what I feel.  Sure there was never any man less deserved this calamity; for I have heard you speak time and again, p. 160and I remember nothing that was unkind, nothing that was untrue, nothing that was not helpful, from your lips.  It is the ill-talkers that should hear no more.  God knows, I know no word of consolation; but I do feel your trouble.  You are the more open to letters now; let me talk to you for two pages.  I have nothing but happiness to tell; and you may bless God you are a man so sound-hearted that (even in the freshness of your calamity) I can come to you with my own good fortune unashamed and secure of sympathy.  It is a good thing to be a good man, whether deaf or whether dumb; and of all our fellow-craftsmen (whom yet they count a jealous race), I never knew one but gave you the name of honesty and kindness: come to think of it gravely, this is better than the finest hearing.  We are all on the march to deafness, blindness, and all conceivable and fatal disabilities; we shall not all get there with a report so good.  My good news is a health astonishingly reinstated.  This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbours; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives,—the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem.

I am fresh just now from the leper settlement of Molokai, playing croquet with seven leper girls, sitting and yarning with old, blind, leper beachcombers in the hospital, sickened with the spectacle of abhorrent suffering and deformation amongst the patients, touched to the heart by the sight of lovely and effective virtues in their helpers: no stranger time have I ever had, nor any so moving.  I do not think it a little thing to be deaf, God knows, and God defend me from the same!—but to be a leper, of one of the self-condemned, how much more awful! and yet there’s a way there also.  ‘There are Molokais everywhere,’ said Mr. Dutton, Father Damien’s dresser; you are but new landed in yours; and my dear and kind adviser, I wish you, with all my soul, that patience and courage which you will require.  Think of me meanwhile p. 161on a trading schooner, bound for the Gilbert Islands, thereafter for the Marshalls, with a diet of fish and cocoanut before me; bound on a cruise of—well, of investigation to what islands we can reach, and to get (some day or other) to Sydney, where a letter addressed to the care of R. Towns & Co. will find me sooner or later; and if it contain any good news, whether of your welfare or the courage with which you bear the contrary, will do me good.—Yours affectionately (although so near a stranger),

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Schooner ‘Equator,’ Apaiang Lagoon, August 22nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—The missionary ship is outside the reef trying (vainly) to get in; so I may have a chance to get a line off.  I am glad to say I shall be home by June p. 162next for the summer, or we shall know the reason why.  For God’s sake be well and jolly for the meeting.  I shall be, I believe, a different character from what you have seen this long while.  This cruise is up to now a huge success, being interesting, pleasant, and profitable.  The beachcomber is perhaps the most interesting character here; the natives are very different, on the whole, from Polynesians: they are moral, stand-offish (for good reasons), and protected by a dark tongue.  It is delightful to meet the few Hawaiians (mostly missionaries) that are dotted about, with their Italian brio and their ready friendliness.  The whites are a strange lot, many of them good, kind, pleasant fellows; others quite the lowest I have ever seen even in the slums of cities.  I wish I had time to narrate to you the doings and character of three white murderers (more or less proven) I have met.  One, the only undoubted assassin of the lot, quite gained my affection in his big home out of a wreck, with his New Hebrides wife in her savage turban of hair and yet a perfect lady, and his three adorable little girls in Rob Roy Macgregor dresses, dancing to the hand organ, performing circus on the floor with startling effects of nudity, and curling up together on a mat to sleep, three sizes, three attitudes, three Rob Roy dresses, and six little clenched fists: the murderer meanwhile brooding and gloating over his chicks, till your whole heart went out to him; and yet his crime on the face of it was dark: disembowelling, in his own house, an old man of seventy, and him drunk.

It is lunch-time, I see, and I must close up with my warmest love to you.  I wish you were here to sit upon me when required.  Ah! if you were but a good sailor!  I will never leave the sea, I think; it is only there that a Briton lives: my poor grandfather, it is from him I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded.  Would you be surprised to learn that I contemplate becoming a shipowner?  I p. 163do, but it is a secret.  Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney stacks and telegraph wires.

Love to Henry James and others near.—Ever yours, my dear fellow,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Equator Town, Apemama, October 1889.

No Morning Star came, however; and so now I try to send this to you by the schooner J. L. Tiernan.  We have been about a month ashore, camping out in a kind of town the king set up for us: on the idea that I was really a ‘big chief’ in England.  He dines with us sometimes, and sends up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself.  This sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself.  Salt junk is the mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter.  The king is a great character—a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist—it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as ‘about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea—and no true, all-the-same lie,’ seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.  Tembinoka is here the great attraction: all the rest is heat and tedium and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes.  We are like to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and then whither?  A strange trade this voyaging: so vague, so bound-down, so helpless.  Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually onions and radishes coming up: ah, onion-despiser, were you but awhile in a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster’s barrow!  I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips.  No doubt we shall all be glad to say farewell to low islands—p. 164I had near said for ever.  They are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine for an island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well among the rocks.  The thought of a mango came to me early this morning and set my greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so—.

I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success.  God knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you—well, in nine months, I hope; but that seems a long time.  I wonder what has befallen me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public mind; and what has befallen The Master, and what kind of a Box the Merry Box has been found.  It is odd to know nothing of all this.  We had an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman’s house on Apaiang (August 23rd or 24th).  You should have seen the crone with a noble masculine face, like that of an old crone [sic], a body like a man’s (naked all but the feathery female girdle), knotting cocoanut leaves and muttering spells: Fanny and I, and the good captain of the Equator, and the Chinaman and his native wife and sister-in-law, all squatting on the floor about the sibyl; and a crowd of dark faces watching from behind her shoulder (she sat right in the doorway) and tittering aloud with strange, appalled, embarrassed laughter at each fresh adjuration.  She informed us you were in England, not travelling and now no longer sick; she promised us a fair wind the next day, and we had it, so I cherish the hope she was as right about Sidney Colvin.  The shipownering has rather petered out since I last wrote, and a good many other plans beside.

Health?  Fanny very so-so; I pretty right upon the whole, and getting through plenty work: I know not quite how, but it seems to me not bad and in places funny.

p. 165South Sea Yarns:

1. The Wrecker

2. The Pearl Fisher

3. The Beachcombers

by R. L. S. and Lloyd O.

The Pearl Fisher, part done, lies in Sydney.  It is The Wrecker we are now engaged upon: strange ways of life, I think, they set forth: things that I can scarce touch upon, or even not at all, in my travel book; and the yarns are good, I do believe.  The Pearl Fisher is for the New York Ledger: the yarn is a kind of Monte Cristo one.  The Wrecker is the least good as a story, I think; but the characters seem to me good.  The Beachcombers is more sentimental.  These three scarce touch the outskirts of the life we have been viewing; a hot-bed of strange characters and incidents: Lord, how different from Europe or the Pallid States!  Farewell.  Heaven knows when this will get to you.  I burn to be in Sydney and have news.

R. L. S.

Schooner ‘Equator,’ at sea. 190 miles off Samoa.
Monday, December 2nd, 1889

MY DEAR COLVIN,—We are just nearing the end of our long cruise.  Rain, calms, squalls, bang—there’s the foretopmast gone; rain, calm, squalls, away with the staysail; more rain, more calm, more squalls; a prodigious heavy sea all the time, and the Equator staggering and hovering like a swallow in a storm; and the cabin, a great square, crowded with wet human beings, and the rain avalanching p. 166on the deck, and the leaks dripping everywhere: Fanny, in the midst of fifteen males, bearing up wonderfully.  But such voyages are at the best a trial.  We had one particularity: coming down on Winslow Reef, p. d. (position doubtful): two positions in the directory, a third (if you cared to count that) on the chart; heavy sea running, and the night due.  The boats were cleared, bread put on board, and we made up our packets for a boat voyage of four or five hundred miles, and turned in, expectant of a crash.  Needless to say it did not come, and no doubt we were far to leeward.  If we only had twopenceworth of wind, we might be at dinner in Apia to-morrow evening; but no such luck: here we roll, dead before a light air—and that is no point of sailing at all for a fore and aft schooner—the sun blazing overhead, thermometer 88°, four degrees above what I have learned to call South Sea temperature; but for all that, land so near, and so much grief being happily astern, we are all pretty gay on board, and have been photographing and draught-playing and sky-larking like anything.  I am minded to stay not very long in Samoa and confine my studies there (as far as any one can forecast) to the history of the late war.  My book is now practically modelled: if I can execute what is designed, there are few better books now extant on this globe, bar the epics, and the big tragedies, and histories, and the choice lyric poetics and a novel or so—none.  But it is not executed yet; and let not him that putteth on his armour, vaunt himself.  At least, nobody has had such stuff; such wild stories, such beautiful scenes, such singular intimacies, such manners and traditions, so incredible a mixture of the beautiful and horrible, the savage and civilised.  I will give you here some idea of the table of contents, which ought to make your mouth water.  I propose to call the book The South Seas: it is rather a large title, but not many people have seen more of them than I, perhaps no one—certainly no one capable of using the material.

Even as so sketched it makes sixty chapters, not less than 300 Cornhill pages; and I suspect not much under 500.  Samoa has yet to be accounted for: I think it will be all history, and I shall work in observations on Samoan manners, under the similar heads in other Polynesian islands.  It is still possible, though unlikely, that I may add a passing visit to Fiji or Tonga, or even both; but I am growing impatient to see yourself, and I do not want to be later than June of coming to England.  Anyway, you see it will be a large work, and as it will be copiously illustrated, the Lord knows what it will cost.  We shall return, God willing, by Sydney, Ceylon, Suez and, I guess, Marseilles the many-masted (copyright epithet).  I shall likely pause a day or two in Paris, but all that is too far ahead—although now it begins to look near—so near, and I can hear the rattle of the hansom up Endell Street, and see the gates swing back, and feel myself jump out upon the Monument steps—Hosanna!—home again.  My dear fellow, now that my father is done with his troubles, and 17 Heriot Row no more than a mere shell, you and that p. 169gaunt old Monument in Bloomsbury are all that I have in view when I use the word home; some passing thoughts there may be of the rooms at Skerryvore, and the black-birds in the chine on a May morning; but the essence is S. C. and the Museum.  Suppose, by some damned accident, you were no more: well, I should return just the same, because of my mother and Lloyd, whom I now think to send to Cambridge; but all the spring would have gone out of me, and ninety per cent. of the attraction lost.  I will copy for you here a copy of verses made in Apemama.

I heard the pulse of the besieging sea
Throb far away all night.  I heard the wind
Fly crying, and convulse tumultuous palms.
I rose and strolled.  The isle was all bright sand,
And flailing fans and shadows of the palm:
The heaven all moon, and wind, and the blind vault—
The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept.
The King, my neighbour, with his host of wives,
Slept in the precinct of the palisade:
Where single, in the wind, under the moon,
Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,
Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel.
   To other lands and nights my fancy turned,
To London first, and chiefly to your house,
The many-pillared and the well-beloved.
There yearning fancy lighted; there again
In the upper room I lay and heard far off
The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
The muffled tramp of the Museum guard
Once more went by me; I beheld again
Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
Again I longed for the returning morn,
The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
The consentaneous trill of tiny song
That weaves round monumental cornices
A passing charm of beauty: most of all,
p. 170For your light foot I wearied, and your knock
That was the glad réveillé of my day.
   Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
At morning through the portico you pass,
One moment glance where, by the pillared wall,
Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
Of faiths forgot and races undivined;
Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice
Incessant, of the breakers on the shore.
As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
So far, so foreign, your divided friends
Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.

R. L. S.

Schooner ‘Equator,’ at sea, Wednesday, 4th December 1889.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—We are now about to rise, like whales, from this long dive, and I make ready a communication which is to go to you by the first mail from Samoa.  How long we shall stay in that group I cannot forecast; but it will be best still to address at Sydney, where I trust, when I shall arrive, perhaps in one month from now, more probably in two or three, to find all news.

Business.—Will you be likely to have a space in the Magazine for a serial story, which should be, ready, I believe, by April, at latest by autumn?  It is called The Wrecker; and in book form will appear as number 1 of South Sea Yarns by R. L. S. and Lloyd Osbourne.  Here is the table as far as fully conceived, and indeed executed. [170] . . .

p. 171The story is founded on fact, the mystery I really believe to be insoluble; the purchase of a wreck has never been handled before, no more has San Francisco.  These seem all elements of success.  There is, besides, a character, Jim Pinkerton, of the advertising American, on whom we build a good deal; and some sketches of the American merchant marine, opium smuggling in Honolulu, etc.  It should run to (about) three hundred pages of my MS.  I would like to know if this tale smiles upon you, if you will have a vacancy, and what you will be willing to pay.  It will of course be copyright in both the States and England.  I am a little anxious to have it tried serially, as it tests the interest of the mystery.

Pleasure.—We have had a fine time in the Gilbert group, though four months on low islands, which involves low diet, is a largish order; and my wife is rather down.  I am myself, up to now, a pillar of health, though our long and vile voyage of calms, squalls, cataracts of rain, sails carried away, foretopmast lost, boats cleared and packets made on the approach of a p. d. reef, etc., has cured me of salt brine, and filled me with a longing for beef steak and mangoes not to be depicted.  The interest has been immense.  Old King Tembinoka of Apemama, the Napoleon of the group, poet, tyrant, altogether a man of mark, gave me the woven corselets of his grandfather, his father and his uncle, and, what pleased me more, told me their singular story, then all manner of strange tales, facts and experiences for my South Sea book, which should be a Tearer, Mr. Burlingame: no one at least has had such stuff.

We are now engaged in the hell of a dead calm, the heat is cruel—it is the only time when I suffer from heat: I have nothing on but a pair of serge trousers, and a singlet without sleeves of Oxford gauze—O, yes, and a red sash about my waist; and yet as I sit here in the cabin, sweat streams from me.  The rest are on deck under a bit of awning; we are not much above a hundred miles from p. 172port, and we might as well be in Kamschatka.  However, I should be honest: this is the first calm I have endured without the added bane of a heavy swell, and the intoxicated blue-bottle wallowings and knockings of the helpless ship.

I wonder how you liked the end of The Master; that was the hardest job I ever had to do; did I do it?

My wife begs to be remembered to yourself and Mrs. Burlingame.  Remember all of us to all friends, particularly Low, in case I don’t get a word through for him.—I am, yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Samoa, [December 1889].

MY DEAR BAXTER,—. . . I cannot return until I have seen either Tonga or Fiji or both: and I must not leave here till I have finished my collections on the war—a very interesting bit of history, the truth often very hard to come at, and the search (for me) much complicated by the German tongue, from the use of which I have desisted (I suppose) these fifteen years.  The last two days I have been mugging with a dictionary from five to six hours a day; besides this, I have to call upon, keep sweet, and judiciously interview all sorts of persons—English, American, German, and Samoan.  It makes a hard life; above all, as after every interview I have to come and get my notes straight on the nail.  I believe I should have got my facts before the end of January, when I shall make our Tonga or Fiji.  I am down right in the hurricane season; but they had so bad a one last p. 173year, I don’t imagine there will be much of an edition this.  Say that I get to Sydney some time in April, and I shall have done well, and be in a position to write a very singular and interesting book, or rather two; for I shall begin, I think, with a separate opuscule on the Samoan Trouble, about as long as Kidnapped, not very interesting, but valuable—and a thing proper to be done.  And then, hey! for the big South Sea Book: a devil of a big one, and full of the finest sport.

This morning as I was going along to my breakfast a little before seven, reading a number of Blackwood’s Magazine, I was startled by a soft talofa, alii (note for my mother: they are quite courteous here in the European style, quite unlike Tahiti), right in my ear: it was Mataafa coming from early mass in his white coat and white linen kilt, with three fellows behind him.  Mataafa is the nearest thing to a hero in my history, and really a fine fellow; plenty sense, and the most dignified, quiet, gentle manners.  Talking of Blackwood—a file of which I was lucky enough to find here in the lawyer’s—Mrs. Oliphant seems in a staggering state: from the Wrong Box to The Master I scarce recognise either my critic or myself.  I gather that The Master should do well, and at least that notice is agreeable reading.  I expect to be home in June: you will have gathered that I am pretty well.  In addition to my labours, I suppose I walk five or six miles a day, and almost every day I ride up and see Fanny and Lloyd, who are in a house in the bush with Ah Fu.  I live in Apia for history’s sake with Moors, an American trader.  Day before yesterday I was arrested and fined for riding fast in the street, which made my blood bitter, as the wife of the manager of the German Firm has twice almost ridden me down, and there seems none to say her nay.  The Germans have behaved pretty badly here, but not in all ways so ill as you may have gathered: they were doubtless much provoked; and if the insane Knappe had not appeared upon the scene, p. 174might have got out of the muddle with dignity.  I write along without rhyme or reason, as things occur to me.

I hope from my outcries about printing you do not think I want you to keep my news or letters in a Blue Beard closet.  I like all friends to hear of me; they all should if I had ninety hours in the day, and strength for all of them; but you must have gathered how hard worked I am, and you will understand I go to bed a pretty tired man.

29th December, [1889].

To-morrow (Monday, I won’t swear to my day of the month; this is the Sunday between Christmas and New Year) I go up the coast with Mr. Clarke, one of the London Society missionaries, in a boat to examine schools, see Tamasese, etc.  Lloyd comes to photograph.  Pray Heaven we have good weather; this is the rainy season; we shall be gone four or five days; and if the rain keep off, I shall be glad of the change; if it rain, it will be beastly.  This explains still further how hard pressed I am, as the mail will be gone ere I return, and I have thus lost the days I meant to write in.  I have a boy, Henry, who interprets and copies for me, and is a great nuisance.  He said he wished to come to me in order to learn ‘long expressions.’  Henry goes up along with us; and as I am not fond of him, he may before the trip is over hear some ‘strong expressions.’  I am writing this on the back balcony at Moors’, palms and a hill like the hill of Kinnoull looking in at me; myself lying on the floor, and (like the parties in Handel’s song) ‘clad in robes of virgin white’; the ink is dreadful, the heat delicious, a fine going breeze in the palms, and from the other side of the house the sudden angry splash and roar of the Pacific on the reef, where the warships are still piled from last year’s hurricane, some under water, one high and dry upon her side, the strangest figure of a ship was ever witnessed; the narrow bay there is full of ships; the men-of-war covered with sail after the rains, p. 175and (especially the German ship, which is fearfully and awfully top heavy) rolling almost yards in, in what appears to be calm water.

Samoa, Apia at least, is far less beautiful than the Marquesas or Tahiti: a more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms.  The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river.  I am not specially attracted by the people; but they are courteous; the women very attractive, and dress lovely; the men purposelike, well set up, tall, lean, and dignified.  As I write the breeze is brisking up, doors are beginning to slam: and shutters; a strong draught sweeps round the balcony; it looks doubtful for to-morrow.  Here I shut up.—Ever your affectionate,

R. L. Stevenson.

Apia, Samoa, January 20th, 1890.

MY DEAR SCOTT,—Shameful indeed that you should not have heard of me before!  I have now been some twenty months in the South Seas, and am (up to date) a person whom you would scarce know.  I think nothing of long walks and rides: I was four hours and a half gone the other day, partly riding, partly climbing up a steep ravine.  I have stood a six months’ voyage on a copra schooner with about three months ashore on coral atolls, which means (except for cocoanuts to drink) no change whatever from ship’s food.  My wife suffered badly—it p. 176was too rough a business altogether—Lloyd suffered—and, in short, I was the only one of the party who ‘kept my end up.’

I am so pleased with this climate that I have decided to settle; have even purchased a piece of land from three to four hundred acres, I know not which till the survey is completed, and shall only return next summer to wind up my affairs in England; thenceforth I mean to be a subject of the High Commissioner.

Now you would have gone longer yet without news of your truant patient, but that I have a medical discovery to communicate.  I find I can (almost immediately) fight off a cold with liquid extract of coca; two or (if obstinate) three teaspoonfuls in the day for a variable period of from one to five days sees the cold generally to the door.  I find it at once produces a glow, stops rigour, and though it makes one very uncomfortable, prevents the advance of the disease.  Hearing of this influenza, it occurred to me that this might prove remedial; and perhaps a stronger exhibition—injections of cocaine, for instance—still better.

If on my return I find myself let in for this epidemic, which seems highly calculated to nip me in the bud, I shall feel very much inclined to make the experiment.  See what a gulf you may save me from if you shall have previously made it on anima vili, on some less important sufferer, and shall have found it worse than useless.

How is Miss Boodle and her family?  Greeting to your brother and all friends in Bournemouth, yours very sincerely,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

p. 177Februar den 3en 1890.

Dampfer Lübeck zwischen Apia und Sydney.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—I have got one delightful letter from you, and heard from my mother of your kindness in going to see her.  Thank you for that: you can in no way more touch and serve me. . . . Ay, ay, it is sad to sell 17; sad and fine were the old days: when I was away in Apemama, I wrote two copies of verse about Edinburgh and the past, so ink black, so golden bright.  I will send them, if I can find them, for they will say something to you, and indeed one is more than half addressed to you.  This is it—

TO MY OLD COMRADES

Do you remember—can we e’er forget?—
How, in the coiled perplexities of youth,
In our wild climate, in our scowling town,
We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared?
The belching winter wind, the missile rain,
The rare and welcome silence of the snows,
The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night,
The grimy spell of the nocturnal town,
Do you remember?—Ah, could one forget!
As when the fevered sick that all night long
Listed the wind intone, and hear at last
The ever-welcome voice of the chanticleer
Sing in the bitter hour before the dawn,—
With sudden ardour, these desire the day:

(Here a squall sends all flying.)

So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope;
So we, exulting, hearkened and desired.
For lo! as in the palace porch of life
We huddled with chimeras, from within—
How sweet to hear!—the music swelled and fell,
And through the breach of the revolving doors
What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled!
p. 178I have since then contended and rejoiced;
Amid the glories of the house of life
Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld:
Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes
Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love
Fall insignificant on my closing ears,
What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind
In our inclement city? what return
But the image of the emptiness of youth,
Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice
Of discontent and rapture and despair?
So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp,
The momentary pictures gleam and fade
And perish, and the night resurges—these
Shall I remember, and then all forget.

They’re pretty second-rate, but felt.  I can’t be bothered to copy the other.

I have bought 314½ acres of beautiful land in the bush behind Apia; when we get the house built, the garden laid, and cattle in the place, it will be something to fall back on for shelter and food; and if the island could stumble into political quiet, it is conceivable it might even bring a little income. . . . We range from 600 to 1500 feet, have five streams, waterfalls, precipices, profound ravines, rich tablelands, fifty head of cattle on the ground (if any one could catch them), a great view of forest, sea, mountains, the warships in the haven: really a noble place.  Some day you are to take a long holiday and come and see us: it has been all planned.

With all these irons in the fire, and cloudy prospects, you may be sure I was pleased to hear a good account of business.  I believed The Master was a sure card: I wonder why Henley thinks it grimy; grim it is, God knows, but sure not grimy, else I am the more deceived.  I am sorry he did not care for it; I place it on the line with Kidnapped myself.  We’ll see as time goes on whether it goes above or falls below.

R. L. S.

SS. Lübeck, [between Apia and Sydney, February] 1890.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—I desire nothing better than to continue my relation with the Magazine, to which it pleases me to hear I have been useful.  The only thing I have ready is the enclosed barbaric piece.  As soon as I have arrived in Sydney I shall send you some photographs, a portrait of Tembinoka, perhaps a view of the palace or of the ‘matted men’ at their singing; also T.’s flag, which my wife designed for him: in a word, what I can do best for you.  It will be thus a foretaste of my book of travels.  I shall ask you to let me have, if I wish it, the use of the plates made, and to make up a little tract of the verses and illustrations, of which you might send six copies to H. M. Tembinoka, King of Apemama via Butaritari, Gilbert Islands.  It might be best to send it by Crawford and Co., S. F.  There is no postal service; and schooners must take it, how they may and when.  Perhaps some such note as this might be prefixed:

At my departure from the island of Apemama, for which you will look in vain in most atlases, the king and I agreed, since we both set up to be in the poetical way, that we should celebrate our separation in verse.  Whether or not his majesty has been true to his bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year.  The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience.  Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author’s Muse, has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts and legends that I saw or heard during two months’ residence upon the island.

R. L. S.

p. 180You will have received from me a letter about The Wrecker.  No doubt it is a new experiment for me, being disguised so much as a study of manners, and the interest turning on a mystery of the detective sort, I think there need be no hesitation about beginning it in the fall of the year.  Lloyd has nearly finished his part, and I shall hope to send you very soon the MS. of about the first four-sevenths.  At the same time, I have been employing myself in Samoa, collecting facts about the recent war; and I propose to write almost at once and to publish shortly a small volume, called I know not what—the War In Samoa, the Samoa Trouble, an Island War, the War of the Three Consuls, I know not—perhaps you can suggest.  It was meant to be a part of my travel book; but material has accumulated on my hands until I see myself forced into volume form, and I hope it may be of use, if it come soon.  I have a few photographs of the war, which will do for illustrations.  It is conceivable you might wish to handle this in the Magazine, although I am inclined to think you won’t, and to agree with you.  But if you think otherwise, there it is.  The travel letters (fifty of them) are already contracted for in papers; these I was quite bound to let M’Clure handle, as the idea was of his suggestion, and I always felt a little sore as to one trick I played him in the matter of the end-papers.  The war-volume will contain some very interesting and picturesque details: more I can’t promise for it.  Of course the fifty newspaper letters will be simply patches chosen from the travel volume (or volumes) as it gets written.

But you see I have in hand:—

Excusez du peu!  And you see what madness it would be to make any fresh engagement.  At the same time, you have The Wrecker and the War Volume, if you like either—or both—to keep my name in the Magazine.

It begins to look as if I should not be able to get any more ballads done this somewhile.  I know the book would sell better if it were all ballads; and yet I am growing half tempted to fill up with some other verses.  A good few are connected with my voyage, such as the ‘Home of Tembinoka’ sent herewith, and would have a sort of slight affinity to the South Sea Ballads.  You might tell me how that strikes a stranger.

In all this, my real interest is with the travel volume, which ought to be of a really extraordinary interest.

I am sending you ‘Tembinoka’ as he stands; but there are parts of him that I hope to better, particularly in stanzas III. and II.  I scarce feel intelligent enough to try just now; and I thought at any rate you had better see it, set it up if you think well, and let me have a proof; so, at least, we shall get the bulk of it straight.  I have spared you Teñkoruti, Tenbaitake, Tembinatake, and other barbarous names, because I thought the dentists in the States had work enough without my assistance; but my chiefs name is Tembinoka, pronounced, according to the present quite modern habit in the Gilberts, Tembinok’.  Compare in the margin Tengkorootch; a singular new trick, setting at defiance all South Sea analogy, for nowhere else do they show even the ability, far less the will, to end a word upon a consonant.  Loia is Lloyd’s name, ship becomes shipé, teapot, tipoté, etc.  p. 182Our admirable friend Herman Melville, of whom, since I could judge, I have thought more than ever, had no ear for languages whatever: his Hapar tribe should be Hapaa, etc.

But this is of no interest to you: suffice it, you see how I am as usual up to the neck in projects, and really all likely bairns this time.  When will this activity cease?  Too soon for me, I dare to say.

R. L. S.

February 4th, 1890, SS. ‘Lübeck.’

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,—In virtue of confessions in your last, you would at the present moment, if you were along of me, be sick; and I will ask you to receive that as an excuse for my hand of write.  Excuse a plain seaman if he regards with scorn the likes of you pore land-lubbers ashore now.  (Reference to nautical ditty.)  Which I may however be allowed to add that when eight months’ mail was laid by my side one evening in Apia, and my wife and I sat up the most of the night to peruse the same—(precious indisposed we were next day in consequence)—no letter, out of so many, more appealed to our hearts than one from the pore, stick-in-the-mud, land-lubbering, common (or garden) Londoner, James Payn.  Thank you for it; my wife says, ‘Can’t I see him when we get back to London?’  I have told her the thing appeared to me within the spear of practical politix.  (Why can’t I spell and write like an honest, sober, god-fearing litry gent?  I think it’s the motion of the ship.)  Here I was interrupted to play chess with the chief engineer; as I grow old, I prefer the ‘athletic sport of cribbage,’ of which (I am sure I misquote) I have just been reading in your delightful Literary Recollections.  How you skim along, you and Andrew Lang (different as you are), and yet the only two who can keep a fellow smiling every page, and ever and again laughing out loud.  I joke wi’ deeficulty, p. 183I believe; I am not funny; and when I am, Mrs. Oliphant says I’m vulgar, and somebody else says (in Latin) that I’m a whore, which seems harsh and even uncalled for: I shall stick to weepers; a 5s. weeper, 2s. 6d. laugher, 1s. shocker.

My dear sir, I grow more and more idiotic; I cannot even feign sanity.  Sometime in the month of June a stalwart weather-beaten man, evidently of seafaring antecedents, shall be observed wending his way between the Athenæum Club and Waterloo Place.  Arrived off No. 17, he shall be observed to bring his head sharply to the wind, and tack into the outer haven.  ‘Captain Payn in the harbour?’—‘Ay, ay, sir.  What ship?’—‘Barquentin R. L. S., nine hundred and odd days out from the port of Bournemouth, homeward bound, with yarns and curiosities.’

Who was it said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t speak of it!’ about Scott and his tears?  He knew what he was saying.  The fear of that hour is the skeleton in all our cupboards; that hour when the pastime and the livelihood go together; and—I am getting hard of hearing myself; a pore young child of forty, but new come frae my Mammy, O!

Excuse these follies, and accept the expression of all my regards.—Yours affectionately,

R. L. Stevenson.

Union Club, Sydney, March 7th, 1890.

MY DEAR CHARLES,—I did not send off the enclosed before from laziness; having gone quite sick, and being p. 184a blooming prisoner here in the club, and indeed in my bedroom.  I was in receipt of your letters and your ornamental photo, and was delighted to see how well you looked, and how reasonably well I stood. . . . I am sure I shall never come back home except to die; I may do it, but shall always think of the move as suicidal, unless a great change comes over me, of which as yet I see no symptom.  This visit to Sydney has smashed me handsomely; and yet I made myself a prisoner here in the club upon my first arrival.  This is not encouraging for further ventures; Sydney winter—or, I might almost say, Sydney spring, for I came when the worst was over—is so small an affair, comparable to our June depression at home in Scotland. . . . The pipe is right again; it was the springs that had rusted, and ought to have been oiled.  Its voice is now that of an angel; but, Lord! here in the club I dare not wake it!  Conceive my impatience to be in my own backwoods and raise the sound of minstrelsy.  What pleasures are to be compared with those of the Unvirtuous Virtuoso.—Yours ever affectionately, the Unvirtuous Virtuoso,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

SS. ‘Janet Nicoll,’ off Upolu [Spring 1890].

MY DEAREST COLVIN,—I was sharply ill at Sydney, cut off, right out of bed, in this steamer on a fresh island cruise, and have already reaped the benefit.  We are excellently found this time, on a spacious vessel, with an p. 185excellent table; the captain, supercargo, our one fellow-passenger, etc., very nice; and the charterer, Mr. Henderson, the very man I could have chosen.  The truth is, I fear, this life is the only one that suits me; so long as I cruise in the South Seas, I shall be well and happy—alas, no, I do not mean that, and absit omen!—I mean that, so soon as I cease from cruising, the nerves are strained, the decline commences, and I steer slowly but surely back to bedward.  We left Sydney, had a cruel rough passage to Auckland, for the Janet is the worst roller I was ever aboard of.  I was confined to my cabin, ports closed, self shied out of the berth, stomach (pampered till the day I left on a diet of perpetual egg-nogg) revolted at ship’s food and ship eating, in a frowsy bunk, clinging with one hand to the plate, with the other to the glass, and using the knife and fork (except at intervals) with the eyelid.  No matter: I picked up hand over hand.  After a day in Auckland, we set sail again; were blown up in the main cabin with calcium fires, as we left the bay.  Let no man say I am unscientific: when I ran, on the alert, out of my stateroom, and found the main cabin incarnadined with the glow of the last scene of a pantomime, I stopped dead: ‘What is this?’ said I.  ‘This ship is on fire, I see that; but why a pantomime?’  And I stood and reasoned the point, until my head was so muddled with the fumes that I could not find the companion.  A few seconds later, the captain had to enter crawling on his belly, and took days to recover (if he has recovered) from the fumes.  By singular good fortune, we got the hose down in time and saved the ship, but Lloyd lost most of his clothes and a great part of our photographs was destroyed.  Fanny saw the native sailors tossing overboard a blazing trunk; she stopped them in time, and behold, it contained my manuscripts.  Thereafter we had three (or two) days fine weather: then got into a gale of wind, with rain and a vexatious sea.  As we drew into our anchorage in a bight of Savage Island, a man ashore told me afterwards p. 186the sight of the Janet Nicoll made him sick; and indeed it was rough play, though nothing to the night before.  All through this gale I worked four to six hours per diem, spearing the ink-bottle like a flying fish, and holding my papers together as I might.  For, of all things, what I was at was history—the Samoan business—and I had to turn from one to another of these piles of manuscript notes, and from one page to another in each, until I should have found employment for the hands of Briareus.  All the same, this history is a godsend for a voyage; I can put in time, getting events co-ordinated and the narrative distributed, when my much-heaving numskull would be incapable of finish or fine style.  At Savage we met the missionary barque John Williams.  I tell you it was a great day for Savage Island: the path up the cliffs was crowded with gay islandresses (I like that feminine plural) who wrapped me in their embraces, and picked my pockets of all my tobacco, with a manner which a touch would have made revolting, but as it was, was simply charming, like the Golden Age.  One pretty, little, stalwart minx, with a red flower behind her ear, had searched me with extraordinary zeal; and when, soon after, I missed my matches, I accused her (she still following us) of being the thief.  After some delay, and with a subtle smile, she produced the box, gave me one match, and put the rest away again.  Too tired to add more.—Your most affectionate,

R. L. S.

S.S. ‘Janet Nicoll,’ off Peru Island, Kingsmills Group,
July 13th, ’90.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,—I am moved to write to you in the matter of the end papers.  I am somewhat tempted to begin them again.  Follow the reasons pro and con:—

1st.  I must say I feel as if something in the nature of p. 187the end paper were a desirable finish to the number, and that the substitutes of occasional essays by occasional contributors somehow fail to fill the bill.  Should you differ with me on this point, no more is to be said.  And what follows must be regarded as lost words.

2nd.  I am rather taken with the idea of continuing the work.  For instance, should you have no distaste for papers of the class called Random Memories, I should enjoy continuing them (of course at intervals), and when they were done I have an idea they might make a readable book.  On the other hand, I believe a greater freedom of choice might be taken, the subjects more varied and more briefly treated, in somewhat approaching the manner of Andrew Lang in the Sign of the Ship; it being well understood that the broken sticks [187] method is one not very suitable (as Colonel Burke would say) to my genius, and not very likely to be pushed far in my practice.  Upon this point I wish you to condense your massive brain.  In the last lot I was promised, and I fondly expected to receive, a vast amount of assistance from intelligent and genial correspondents.  I assure you, I never had a scratch of a pen from any one above the level of a village idiot, except once, when a lady sowed my head full of grey hairs by announcing that she was going to direct her life in future by my counsels.  Will the correspondents be more copious and less irrelevant in the future?  Suppose that to be the case, will they be of any use to me in my place of exile?  Is it possible for a man in Samoa to be in touch with the great heart of the People?  And is it not perhaps a mere folly to attempt, from so hopeless a distance, anything so delicate as a series of papers?  Upon these points, perpend, and give me the results of your perpensions.

3rd.  The emolument would be agreeable to your humble servant.

I have now stated all the pros, and the most of the cons p. 188are come in by the way.  There follows, however, one immense Con (with a capital ‘C’), which I beg you to consider particularly.  I fear that, to be of any use for your magazine, these papers should begin with the beginning of a volume.  Even supposing my hands were free, this would be now impossible for next year.  You have to consider whether, supposing you have no other objection, it would be worth while to begin the series in the middle of a volume, or desirable to delay the whole matter until the beginning of another year.