The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 1074

Beschreibung

According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

feedback welcome: [email protected]

visit us at samizdat.com

Volume 1

CHAPTER I - STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH, TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS

CHAPTER II - STUDENT DAYS - ORDERED SOUTH, SEPTEMBER 1873-JULY 1875

CHAPTER III - ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR, EDINBURGH - PARIS -FONTAINEBLEAU, JULY 1875-JULY 1879

CHAPTER IV - THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, MONTEREY AND SAN FRANCISCO, JULY  1879-JULY 1880

CHAPTER V - ALPINE WINTERS AND HIGHLAND SUMMERS, AUGUST 1880- OCTOBER 1882

CHAPTER VI - MARSEILLES AND HYERES, OCTOBER 1882-AUGUST 1884

CHAPTER VII - LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH, SEPTEMBER 1884-DECEMBER 1885

Volume 2

CHAPTER VIII - LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH, CONTINUED, JANUARY 1886-JULY 1887

CHAPTER IX - THE UNITED STATES AGAIN:  WINTER IN THE ADIRONDACKS,  AUGUST 1887-OCTOBER 1888

CHAPTER X - PACIFIC VOYAGES, JUNE 1888-NOVEMBER 1890

CHAPTER XI - LIFE IN SAMOA, NOVEMBER 1890-DECEMBER 1892

CHAPTER XII - LIFE IN SAMOA, CONTINUED, JANUARY 1893-DECEMBER 1894

Volume 1

CHAPTER I - STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH, TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS, 1868-1873

Letter:  SPRING GROVE SCHOOL, 12TH NOVEMBER 1863.

MA CHERE MAMAN, - Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour  prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous ecrit ce lettre.  Ma  grande gatteaux est arrive il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait  17 shillings.  Sur la soiree de Monseigneur Faux il y etait  quelques belles feux d'artifice.  Mais les polissons entrent dans  notre champ et nos feux d'artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared  quickly, but we charged them out of the field.  Je suis presque  driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme  grand un bruit qu'll est possible.  I hope you will find your house  at Mentone nice.  I have been obliged to stop from writing by the  want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.

My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable.  I  do not feel well, and I wish to get home.

Do take me with you.

R. STEVENSON.

Letter:  2 SULYARDE TERRACE, TORQUAY, THURSDAY (APRIL 1866).

RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE, - I write to make a request of the  most moderate nature.  Every year I have cost you an enormous -  nay, elephantine - sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and  the most expensive time of the twelve months was March.

But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and  the general ailments of the human race have been successfully  braved by yours truly.

Does not this deserve remuneration?

I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to  your justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your  purse.

My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more - my sense of  justice forbids the receipt of less - than half-a-crown. - Greeting  from, Sir, your most affectionate and needy son,

R. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

WICK, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1868.

MY DEAR MOTHER, - . . . Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open  triangular bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or  steep earth-bank, of no great height.  The grey houses of Pulteney  extend along the southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is  about half-way down this shore - no, six-sevenths way down - that  the new breakwater extends athwart the bay.

Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty:  bare, grey shores,  grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles;  not even the greenness of a tree.  The southerly heights, when I  came here, were black with people, fishers waiting on wind and  night.  Now all the S.Y.S. (Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the  bay, and the Wick men stay indoors or wrangle on the quays with  dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud, and herring  refuse.  The day when the boats put out to go home to the Hebrides,  the girl here told me there was 'a black wind'; and on going out, I  found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque.  A cold,  BLACK southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain; it  was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.

In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the  usual 'Fine day' or 'Good morning.'  Both come shaking their heads,  and both say, 'Breezy, breezy!'  And such is the atrocious quality  of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by  the fact.

The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid,  inconceivably lazy and heavy to move.  You bruise against them,  tumble over them, elbow them against the wall - all to no purpose;  they will not budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every  step.

To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I  ever saw.  Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over- hung gullies, natural arches, and deep green pools below them,  almost too deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the darker  weed:  there are deep caves too.  In one of these lives a tribe of  gipsies.  The men are ALWAYS drunk, simply and truthfully always.   From morning to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are  either sleeping off the last debauch, or hulking about the cove 'in  the horrors.'  The cave is deep, high, and airy, and might be made  comfortable enough.  But they just live among heaped boulders, damp  with continual droppings from above, with no more furniture than  two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and a few ragged  cloaks.  In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often forces  them to abandon it.

An EMEUTE of disappointed fishers was feared, and two ships of war  are in the bay to render assistance to the municipal authorities.   This is the ides; and, to all intents and purposes, said ides are  passed.  Still there is a good deal of disturbance, many drunk men,  and a double supply of police.  I saw them sent for by some people  and enter an inn, in a pretty good hurry:  what it was for I do not  know.

You would see by papa's letter about the carpenter who fell off the  staging:  I don't think I was ever so much excited in my life.  The  man was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a  Highlander, and - need I add it? - dickens a word could I  understand of his answer.  What is still worse, I find the people  here-about - that is to say, the Highlanders, not the northmen -  don't understand ME.

I have lost a shilling's worth of postage stamps, which has damped  my ardour for buying big lots of 'em:  I'll buy them one at a time  as I want 'em for the future.

The Free Church minister and I got quite thick.  He left last night  about two in the morning, when I went to turn in.  He gave me the  enclosed. - I remain your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

WICK, September 5, 1868.  MONDAY.

MY DEAR MAMMA, - This morning I got a delightful haul:  your letter  of the fourth (surely mis-dated); Papa's of same day; Virgil's  BUCOLICS, very thankfully received; and Aikman's ANNALS, a precious  and most acceptable donation, for which I tender my most ebullient  thanksgivings.  I almost forgot to drink my tea and eat mine egg.

It contains more detailed accounts than anything I ever saw, except  Wodrow, without being so portentously tiresome and so desperately  overborne with footnotes, proclamations, acts of Parliament, and  citations as that last history.

I have been reading a good deal of Herbert.  He's a clever and a  devout cove; but in places awfully twaddley (if I may use the  word).  Oughtn't this to rejoice Papa's heart -

 'Carve or discourse; do not a famine fear. Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.'

 You understand?  The 'fearing a famine' is applied to people  gulping down solid vivers without a word, as if the ten lean kine  began to-morrow.

Do you remember condemning something of mine for being too  obtrusively didactic.  Listen to Herbert -

 'Is it not verse except enchanted groves And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines? Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves? MUST ALL BE VEILED, WHILE HE THAT READS DIVINES CATCHING THE SENSE AT TWO REMOVES?'

 You see, 'except' was used for 'unless' before 1630.

 TUESDAY. - The riots were a hum.  No more has been heard; and one  of the war-steamers has deserted in disgust.

The MOONSTONE is frightfully interesting:  isn't the detective  prime?  Don't say anything about the plot; for I have only read on  to the end of Betteredge's narrative, so don't know anything about  it yet.

I thought to have gone on to Thurso to-night, but the coach was  full; so I go to-morrow instead.

To-day I had a grouse:  great glorification.

There is a drunken brute in the house who disturbed my rest last  night.  He's a very respectable man in general, but when on the  'spree' a most consummate fool.  When he came in he stood on the  top of the stairs and preached in the dark with great solemnity and  no audience from 12 P.M. to half-past one.  At last I opened my  door.  'Are we to have no sleep at all for that DRUNKEN BRUTE?'  I  said.  As I hoped, it had the desired effect.  'Drunken brute!' he  howled, in much indignation; then after a pause, in a voice of some  contrition, 'Well, if I am a drunken brute, it's only once in the  twelvemonth!'  And that was the end of him; the insult rankled in  his mind; and he retired to rest.  He is a fish-curer, a man over  fifty, and pretty rich too.  He's as bad again to-day; but I'll be  shot if he keeps me awake, I'll douse him with water if he makes a  row. - Ever your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

WICK, SEPTEMBER 1868.  SATURDAY, 10 A.M.

MY DEAR MOTHER, - The last two days have been dreadfully hard, and  I was so tired in the evenings that I could not write.  In fact,  last night I went to sleep immediately after dinner, or very nearly  so.  My hours have been 10-2 and 3-7 out in the lighter or the  small boat, in a long, heavy roll from the nor'-east.  When the dog  was taken out, he got awfully ill; one of the men, Geordie Grant by  name and surname, followed SHOOT with considerable ECLAT; but,  wonderful to relate! I kept well.  My hands are all skinned,  blistered, discoloured, and engrained with tar, some of which  latter has established itself under my nails in a position of such  natural strength that it defies all my efforts to dislodge it.  The  worst work I had was when David (MacDonald's eldest) and I took the  charge ourselves.  He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken  the guys as we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two  men.  I was with four men in the boat.  We dropped an anchor out a  good bit, then tied a cord to the pole, took a turn round the  sternmost thwart with it, and pulled on the anchor line.  As the  great, big, wet hawser came in it soaked you to the skin:  I was  the sternest (used, by way of variety, for sternmost) of the lot,  and had to coil it - a work which involved, from ITS being so stiff  and YOUR being busy pulling with all your might, no little trouble  and an extra ducking.  We got it up; and, just as we were going to  sing 'Victory!' one of the guys slipped in, the pole tottered -  went over on its side again like a shot, and behold the end of our  labour.

You see, I have been roughing it; and though some parts of the  letter may be neither very comprehensible nor very interesting to  YOU, I think that perhaps it might amuse Willie Traquair, who  delights in all such dirty jobs.

The first day, I forgot to mention, was like mid-winter for cold,  and rained incessantly so hard that the livid white of our cold- pinched faces wore a sort of inflamed rash on the windward side.

I am not a bit the worse of it, except fore-mentioned state of  hands, a slight crick in my neck from the rain running down, and  general stiffness from pulling, hauling, and tugging for dear life.

We have got double weights at the guys, and hope to get it up like  a shot.

What fun you three must be having!  I hope the cold don't disagree  with you. - I remain, my dear mother, your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

PULTENEY, WICK, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1868.

MY DEAR MOTHER, - Another storm:  wind higher, rain thicker:  the  wind still rising as the night closes in and the sea slowly rising  along with it; it looks like a three days' gale.

Last week has been a blank one:  always too much sea.

I enjoyed myself very much last night at the R.'s.  There was a  little dancing, much singing and supper.

Are you not well that you do not write?  I haven't heard from you  for more than a fortnight.

The wind fell yesterday and rose again to-day; it is a dreadful  evening; but the wind is keeping the sea down as yet.  Of course,  nothing more has been done to the poles; and I can't tell when I  shall be able to leave, not for a fortnight yet, I fear, at the  earliest, for the winds are persistent.  Where's Murra?  Is Cummie  struck dumb about the boots?  I wish you would get somebody to  write an interesting letter and say how you are, for you're on the  broad of your back I see.  There hath arrived an inroad of farmers  to-night; and I go to avoid them to M- if he's disengaged, to the  R.'s if not.

SUNDAY (LATER). - Storm without:  wind and rain:  a confused mass  of wind-driven rain-squalls, wind-ragged mist, foam, spray, and  great, grey waves.  Of this hereafter; in the meantime let us  follow the due course of historic narrative.

Seven P.M. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad in spotless  blacks, white tie, shirt, et caetera, and finished off below with a  pair of navvies' boots.  How true that the devil is betrayed by his  feet!  A message to Cummy at last.  Why, O treacherous woman! were  my dress boots withheld?

Dramatis personae:  pere R., amusing, long-winded, in many points  like papa; mere R., nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt Margaret  ('t'ould man knew Uncle Alan); fille R., nommee Sara (no h), rather  nice, lights up well, good voice, INTERESTED face; Miss L., nice  also, washed out a little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental; fils  R., in a Leith office, smart, full of happy epithet, amusing.  They  are very nice and very kind, asked me to come back - 'any night you  feel dull; and any night doesn't mean no night:  we'll be so glad  to see you.'  CEST LA MERE QUI PARLE.

I was back there again to-night.  There was hymn-singing, and  general religious controversy till eight, after which talk was  secular.  Mrs. S. was deeply distressed about the boot business.   She consoled me by saying that many would be glad to have such feet  whatever shoes they had on.  Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring  men are too facile to be compared with!  This looks like enjoyment:   better speck than Anster.

I have done with frivolity.  This morning I was awakened by Mrs. S.  at the door.  'There's a ship ashore at Shaltigoe!'  As my senses  slowly flooded, I heard the whistling and the roaring of wind, and  the lashing of gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain.  I got up,  dressed, and went out.  The mizzled sky and rain blinded you.

 C                  D +------------------- | | +-------------------          \          A\            \            B\

 C D is the new pier.

A the schooner ashore.  B the salmon house.

She was a Norwegian:  coming in she saw our first gauge-pole,  standing at point E. Norse skipper thought it was a sunk smack, and  dropped his anchor in full drift of sea:  chain broke:  schooner  came ashore.  Insured laden with wood:  skipper owner of vessel and  cargo bottom out.

I was in a great fright at first lest we should be liable; but it  seems that's all right.

Some of the waves were twenty feet high.  The spray rose eighty  feet at the new pier.  Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway  seems carried away.  There is something fishy at the far end where  the cross wall is building; but till we are able to get along, all  speculation is vain.

I am so sleepy I am writing nonsense.

I stood a long while on the cope watching the sea below me; I hear  its dull, monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the  wind; and there came ever recurring to my mind the verse I am so  fond of:-

 'But yet the Lord that is on high Is more of might by far Than noise of many waters is Or great sea-billows are.'

 The thunder at the wall when it first struck - the rush along ever  growing higher - the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet  above you - and the 'noise of many waters,' the roar, the hiss, the  'shrieking' among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your  feet.  I watched if it threw the big stones at the wall; but it  never moved them.

MONDAY. - The end of the work displays gaps, cairns of ten ton  blocks, stones torn from their places and turned right round.  The  damage above water is comparatively little:  what there may be  below, ON NE SAIT PAS ENCORE.  The roadway is torn away, cross  heads, broken planks tossed here and there, planks gnawn and  mumbled as if a starved bear had been trying to eat them, planks  with spales lifted from them as if they had been dressed with a  rugged plane, one pile swaying to and fro clear of the bottom, the  rails in one place sunk a foot at least.  This was not a great  storm, the waves were light and short.  Yet when we are standing at  the office, I felt the ground beneath me QUAIL as a huge roller  thundered on the work at the last year's cross wall.

How could NOSTER AMICUS Q. MAXIMUS appreciate a storm at Wick?  It  requires a little of the artistic temperament, of which Mr. T. S.,  C.E., possesses some, whatever he may say.  I can't look at it  practically however:  that will come, I suppose, like grey hair or  coffin nails.

Our pole is snapped:  a fortnight's work and the loss of the Norse  schooner all for nothing! - except experience and dirty clothes. -  Your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. CHURCHILL BABINGTON

[SWANSTON COTTAGE, LOTHIANBURN, SUMMER 1871.]

MY DEAR MAUD, - If you have forgotten the hand-writing - as is like  enough - you will find the name of a former correspondent (don't  know how to spell that word) at the end.  I have begun to write to  you before now, but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a  drawerful of like fiascos.  This time I am determined to carry  through, though I have nothing specially to say.

We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening  out of their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the  hoarfrost of daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear,  already beginning to 'stint his pipe of mellower days' - which is  very apposite (I can't spell anything to-day - ONE p or TWO?) and  pretty.  All the same, we have been having shocking weather - cold  winds and grey skies.

I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can't go back so  far.  I am reading Clarendon's HIST. REBELL. at present, with which  I am more pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal.  It  is a pet idea of mine that one gets more real truth out of one  avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists -  wolves in sheep's clothing - simpering honesty as they suppress  documents.  After all, what one wants to know is not what people  did, but why they did it - or rather, why they THOUGHT they did it;  and to learn that, you should go to the men themselves.  Their very  falsehood is often more than another man's truth.

I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I  admire, etc.  But is there not an irritating deliberation and  correctness about her and everybody connected with her?  If she  would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do  something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief.  I  sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the  bitterness of my spirit.  I know I felt a weight taken off my heart  when I heard he was extravagant.  It is quite possible to be too  good for this evil world; and unquestionably, Mrs. Hutchinson was.   The way in which she talks of herself makes one's blood run cold.   There - I am glad to have got that out - but don't say it to  anybody - seal of secrecy.

Please tell Mr. Babington that I have never forgotten one of his  drawings - a Rubens, I think - a woman holding up a model ship.   That woman had more life in her than ninety per cent. of the lame  humans that you see crippling about this earth.

By the way, that is a feature in art which seems to have come in  with the Italians.  Your old Greek statues have scarce enough  vitality in them to keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal.  A  shrewd country attorney, in a turned white neckcloth and rusty  blacks, would just take one of these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly  by his beautiful, strong arm, trot the unresisting statue down a  little gallery of legal shams, and turn the poor fellow out at the  other end, 'naked, as from the earth he came.'  There is more  latent life, more of the coiled spring in the sleeping dog, about a  recumbent figure of Michael Angelo's than about the most excited of  Greek statues.  The very marble seems to wrinkle with a wild energy  that we never feel except in dreams.

I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing  interesting to talk about.

I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come  north this summer.  We should be so glad to see you both.  DO  reconsider it. - Believe me, my dear Maud, ever your most  affectionate cousin,

LOUIS STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM

1871?

MY DEAR CUMMY, - I was greatly pleased by your letter in many ways.   Of course, I was glad to hear from you; you know, you and I have so  many old stories between us, that even if there was nothing else,  even if there was not a very sincere respect and affection, we  should always be glad to pass a nod.  I say 'even if there was  not.'  But you know right well there is.  Do not suppose that I  shall ever forget those long, bitter nights, when I coughed and  coughed and was so unhappy, and you were so patient and loving with  a poor, sick child.  Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might become a man  worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have thrown  away your pains.

Happily, it is not the result of our acts that makes them brave and  noble, but the acts themselves and the unselfish love that moved us  to do them.  'Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of  these.'  My dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man can  say nearer his heart except his mother or his wife - my dear old  nurse, God will make good to you all the good that you have done,  and mercifully forgive you all the evil.  And next time when the  spring comes round, and everything is beginning once again, if you  should happen to think that you might have had a child of your own,  and that it was hard you should have spent so many years taking  care of some one else's prodigal, just you think this - you have  been for a great deal in my life; you have made much that there is  in me, just as surely as if you had conceived me; and there are  sons who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am to you.   For I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and it is with a very  sincere emotion that I write myself your little boy,

Louis.

Letter:  TO CHARLES BAXTER

DUNBLANE, FRIDAY, 5TH MARCH 1872.

MY DEAR BAXTER, - By the date you may perhaps understand the  purport of my letter without any words wasted about the matter.  I  cannot walk with you to-morrow, and you must not expect me.  I came  yesterday afternoon to Bridge of Allan, and have been very happy  ever since, as every place is sanctified by the eighth sense,  Memory.  I walked up here this morning (three miles, TU-DIEU! a  good stretch for me), and passed one of my favourite places in the  world, and one that I very much affect in spirit when the body is  tied down and brought immovably to anchor on a sickbed.  It is a  meadow and bank on a corner on the river, and is connected in my  mind inseparably with Virgil's ECLOGUES.  HIC CORULIS MISTOS INTER  CONSEDIMUS ULMOS, or something very like that, the passage begins  (only I know my short-winded Latinity must have come to grief over  even this much of quotation); and here, to a wish, is just such a  cavern as Menalcas might shelter himself withal from the bright  noon, and, with his lips curled backward, pipe himself blue in the  face, while MESSIEURS LES ARCADIENS would roll out those cloying  hexameters that sing themselves in one's mouth to such a curious  lifting chant.

In such weather one has the bird's need to whistle; and I, who am  specially incompetent in this art, must content myself by  chattering away to you on this bit of paper.  All the way along I  was thanking God that he had made me and the birds and everything  just as they are and not otherwise; for although there was no sun,  the air was so thrilled with robins and blackbirds that it made the

 heart tremble with joy, and the leaves are far enough forward on  the underwood to give a fine promise for the future.  Even myself,  as I say, I would not have had changed in one IOTA this forenoon,  in spite of all my idleness and Guthrie's lost paper, which is ever  present with me - a horrible phantom.

No one can be alone at home or in a quite new place.  Memory and  you must go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish  to cook up a proper dish of solitude.  It is in these little  flights of mine that I get more pleasure than in anything else.   Now, at present, I am supremely uneasy and restless - almost to the  extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy it, and how I SHALL enjoy it  afterwards (please God), if I get years enough allotted to me for  the thing to ripen in.  When I am a very old and very respectable  citizen with white hair and bland manners and a gold watch, I shall  hear three crows cawing in my heart, as I heard them this morning:   I vote for old age and eighty years of retrospect.  Yet, after all,  I dare say, a short shrift and a nice green grave are about as  desirable.

Poor devil! how I am wearying you!  Cheer up.  Two pages more, and  my letter reaches its term, for I have no more paper.  What  delightful things inns and waiters and bagmen are!  If we didn't  travel now and then, we should forget what the feeling of life is.   The very cushion of a railway carriage - 'the things restorative to  the touch.'  I can't write, confound it!  That's because I am so  tired with my walk.  Believe me, ever your affectionate friend,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO CHARLES BAXTER

DUNBLANE, TUESDAY, 9TH APRIL 1872.

MY DEAR BAXTER, - I don't know what you mean.  I know nothing about  the Standing Committee of the Spec., did not know that such a body  existed, and even if it doth exist, must sadly repudiate all  association with such 'goodly fellowship.'  I am a 'Rural  Voluptuary' at present.  THAT is what is the matter with me.  The  Spec. may go whistle.  As for 'C. Baxter, Esq.,' who is he?  'One  Baxter, or Bagster, a secretary,' I say to mine acquaintance, 'is  at present disquieting my leisure with certain illegal,  uncharitable, unchristian, and unconstitutional documents called  BUSINESS LETTERS:  THE AFFAIR IS IN THE HANDS OF THE POLICE.'  Do  you hear THAT, you evildoer?  Sending business letters is surely a  far more hateful and slimy degree of wickedness than sending  threatening letters; the man who throws grenades and torpedoes is  less malicious; the Devil in red-hot hell rubs his hands with glee  as he reckons up the number that go forth spreading pain and  anxiety with each delivery of the post.

I have been walking to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the  brawling Allan.  My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that  I cheered my lonely way with the following, in a triumphant chaunt:   'Thank God for the grass, and the fir-trees, and the crows, and the  sheep, and the sunshine, and the shadows of the fir-trees.'  I hold  that he is a poor mean devil who can walk alone, in such a place  and in such weather, and doesn't set up his lungs and cry back to  the birds and the river.  Follow, follow, follow me.  Come hither,  come hither, come hither - here shall you see - no enemy - except a  very slight remnant of winter and its rough weather.  My bedroom,  when I awoke this morning, was full of bird-songs, which is the  greatest pleasure in life.  Come hither, come hither, come hither,  and when you come bring the third part of the EARTHLY PARADISE; you  can get it for me in Elliot's for two and tenpence (2s. 10d.)  (BUSINESS HABITS).  Also bring an ounce of honeydew from Wilson's.

R. L. S.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

BRUSSELS, THURSDAY, 25TH JULY 1872.

MY DEAR MOTHER, - I am here at last, sitting in my room, without  coat or waistcoat, and with both window and door open, and yet  perspiring like a terra-cotta jug or a Gruyere cheese.

We had a very good passage, which we certainly deserved, in  compensation for having to sleep on cabin floor, and finding  absolutely nothing fit for human food in the whole filthy  embarkation.  We made up for lost time by sleeping on deck a good  part of the forenoon.  When I woke, Simpson was still sleeping the  sleep of the just, on a coil of ropes and (as appeared afterwards)  his own hat; so I got a bottle of Bass and a pipe and laid hold of  an old Frenchman of somewhat filthy aspect (FIAT EXPERIMENTUM IN  CORPORE VILI) to try my French upon.  I made very heavy weather of  it.  The Frenchman had a very pretty young wife; but my French  always deserted me entirely when I had to answer her, and so she  soon drew away and left me to her lord, who talked of French  politics, Africa, and domestic economy with great vivacity.  From  Ostend a smoking-hot journey to Brussels.  At Brussels we went off  after dinner to the Parc.  If any person wants to be happy, I  should advise the Parc.  You sit drinking iced drinks and smoking  penny cigars under great old trees.  The band place, covered walks,  etc., are all lit up.  And you can't fancy how beautiful was the  contrast of the great masses of lamplit foliage and the dark  sapphire night sky with just one blue star set overhead in the  middle of the largest patch.  In the dark walks, too, there are  crowds of people whose faces you cannot see, and here and there a  colossal white statue at the corner of an alley that gives the  place a nice, ARTIFICIAL, eighteenth century sentiment.  There was  a good deal of summer lightning blinking overhead, and the black  avenues and white statues leapt out every minute into short-lived  distinctness.

I get up to add one thing more.  There is in the hotel a boy in  whom I take the deepest interest.  I cannot tell you his age, but  the very first time I saw him (when I was at dinner yesterday) I  was very much struck with his appearance.  There is something very  leonine in his face, with a dash of the negro especially, if I  remember aright, in the mouth.  He has a great quantity of dark  hair, curling in great rolls, not in little corkscrews, and a pair  of large, dark, and very steady, bold, bright eyes.  His manners  are those of a prince.  I felt like an overgrown ploughboy beside  him.  He speaks English perfectly, but with, I think, sufficient  foreign accent to stamp him as a Russian, especially when his  manners are taken into account.  I don't think I ever saw any one  who looked like a hero before.  After breakfast this morning I was  talking to him in the court, when he mentioned casually that he had  caught a snake in the Riesengebirge.  'I have it here,' he said;  'would you like to see it?'  I said yes; and putting his hand into  his breast-pocket, he drew forth not a dried serpent skin, but the  head and neck of the reptile writhing and shooting out its horrible  tongue in my face.  You may conceive what a fright I got.  I send  off this single sheet just now in order to let you know I am safe  across; but you must not expect letters often.

R. L. STEVENSON.

P.S. - The snake was about a yard long, but harmless, and now, he  says, quite tame.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

HOTEL LANDSBERG, FRANKFURT, MONDAY, 29TH JULY 1872.

... LAST night I met with rather an amusing adventurette.  Seeing a  church door open, I went in, and was led by most importunate  finger-bills up a long stair to the top of the tower.  The father  smoking at the door, the mother and the three daughters received me  as if I was a friend of the family and had come in for an evening  visit.  The youngest daughter (about thirteen, I suppose, and a  pretty little girl) had been learning English at the school, and  was anxious to play it off upon a real, veritable Englander; so we  had a long talk, and I was shown photographs, etc., Marie and I  talking, and the others looking on with evident delight at having  such a linguist in the family.  As all my remarks were duly  translated and communicated to the rest, it was quite a good German  lesson.  There was only one contretemps during the whole interview  - the arrival of another visitor, in the shape (surely) the last of  God's creatures, a wood-worm of the most unnatural and hideous  appearance, with one great striped horn sticking out of his nose  like a boltsprit.  If there are many wood-worms in Germany, I shall  come home.  The most courageous men in the world must be  entomologists.  I had rather be a lion-tamer.

To-day I got rather a curiosity - LIEDER UND BALLADEN VON ROBERT  BURNS, translated by one Silbergleit, and not so ill done either.   Armed with which, I had a swim in the Main, and then bread and  cheese and Bavarian beer in a sort of cafe, or at least the German  substitute for a cafe; but what a falling off after the heavenly  forenoons in Brussels!

I have bought a meerschaum out of local sentiment, and am now very  low and nervous about the bargain, having paid dearer than I should  in England, and got a worse article, if I can form a judgment.

Do write some more, somebody.  To-morrow I expect I shall go into  lodgings, as this hotel work makes the money disappear like butter  in a furnace. - Meanwhile believe me, ever your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

HOTEL LANDSBERG, THURSDAY, 1ST AUGUST 1872.

... YESTERDAY I walked to Eckenheim, a village a little way out of  Frankfurt, and turned into the alehouse.  In the room, which was  just such as it would have been in Scotland, were the landlady, two  neighbours, and an old peasant eating raw sausage at the far end.   I soon got into conversation; and was astonished when the landlady,  having asked whether I were an Englishman, and received an answer  in the affirmative, proceeded to inquire further whether I were not  also a Scotchman.  It turned out that a Scotch doctor - a professor  - a poet - who wrote books - GROSS WIE DAS - had come nearly every  day out of Frankfurt to the ECKENHEIMER WIRTHSCHAFT, and had left  behind him a most savoury memory in the hearts of all its  customers.  One man ran out to find his name for me, and returned  with the news that it was COBIE (Scobie, I suspect); and during his  absence the rest were pouring into my ears the fame and  acquirements of my countryman.  He was, in some undecipherable  manner, connected with the Queen of England and one of the  Princesses.  He had been in Turkey, and had there married a wife of  immense wealth.  They could find apparently no measure adequate to  express the size of his books.  In one way or another, he had  amassed a princely fortune, and had apparently only one sorrow, his  daughter to wit, who had absconded into a KLOSTER, with a  considerable slice of the mother's GELD.  I told them we had no  klosters in Scotland, with a certain feeling of superiority.  No  more had they, I was told - 'HIER IST UNSER KLOSTER!' and the  speaker motioned with both arms round the taproom.  Although the  first torrent was exhausted, yet the Doctor came up again in all  sorts of ways, and with or without occasion, throughout the whole  interview; as, for example, when one man, taking his pipe out of  his mouth and shaking his head, remarked APROPOS of nothing and  with almost defiant conviction, 'ER WAR EIN FEINER MANN, DER HERR  DOCTOR,' and was answered by another with 'YAW, YAW, UND TRANK  IMMER ROTHEN WEIN.'

Setting aside the Doctor, who had evidently turned the brains of  the entire village, they were intelligent people.  One thing in  particular struck me, their honesty in admitting that here they  spoke bad German, and advising me to go to Coburg or Leipsic for  German. - 'SIE SPRECHEN DA REIN' (clean), said one; and they all  nodded their heads together like as many mandarins, and repeated  REIN, SO REIN in chorus.

Of course we got upon Scotland.  The hostess said, 'DIE  SCHOTTLANDER TRINKEN GERN SCHNAPPS,' which may be freely  translated, 'Scotchmen are horrid fond of whisky.'  It was  impossible, of course, to combat such a truism; and so I proceeded  to explain the construction of toddy, interrupted by a cry of  horror when I mentioned the HOT water; and thence, as I find is  always the case, to the most ghastly romancing about Scottish  scenery and manners, the Highland dress, and everything national or  local that I could lay my hands upon.  Now that I have got my  German Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a  conversation, and read a few translations to every yawning audience  that I can gather.  I am grown most insufferably national, you see.   I fancy it is a punishment for my want of it at ordinary times.   Now, what do you think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but,  alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my  informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 'S IST  LANGE HER, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see,  madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of  whatsoever corner of patois it found its birth in.

 'MEITZ HERZ IST IM HOCHLAND, MEAN HERZ IST NICHT HIER, MEIN HERZ IST IM HOCHLAND IM GRUNEN REVIER. IM GRUNEN REVIERE ZU JAGEN DAS REH; MEIN HERZ IST IM HOCHLAND, WO IMMER ICH GEH.'

 I don't think I need translate that for you.

There is one thing that burthens me a good deal in my patriotic  garrulage, and that is the black ignorance in which I grope about  everything, as, for example, when I gave yesterday a full and, I  fancy, a startlingly incorrect account of Scotch education to a  very stolid German on a garden bench:  he sat and perspired under  it, however with much composure.  I am generally glad enough to  fall back again, after these political interludes, upon Burns,  toddy, and the Highlands.

I go every night to the theatre, except when there is no opera.  I  cannot stand a play yet; but I am already very much improved, and  can understand a good deal of what goes on.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 1872. - In the evening, at the theatre, I had a  great laugh.  Lord Allcash in FRA DIAVOLO, with his white hat, red  guide-books, and bad German, was the PIECE-DE-RESISTANCE from a  humorous point of view; and I had the satisfaction of knowing that  in my own small way I could minister the same amusement whenever I  chose to open my mouth.

I am just going off to do some German with Simpson. - Your  affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO THOMAS STEVENSON

FRANKFURT, ROSENGASSE 13, AUGUST 4, 1872.

MY DEAR FATHER, - You will perceive by the head of this page that  we have at last got into lodgings, and powerfully mean ones too.   If I were to call the street anything but SHADY, I should be  boasting.  The people sit at their doors in shirt-sleeves, smoking  as they do in Seven Dials of a Sunday.

Last night we went to bed about ten, for the first time  HOUSEHOLDERS in Germany - real Teutons, with no deception, spring,  or false bottom.  About half-past one there began such a  trumpeting, shouting, pealing of bells, and scurrying hither and  thither of feet as woke every person in Frankfurt out of their  first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension that the last day was  at hand.  The whole street was alive, and we could hear people  talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their windows,  all around us.  At last I made out what a man was saying in the  next room.  It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, he said (Sachsenhausen  is the suburb on the other side of the Main), and he wound up with  one of the most tremendous falsehoods on record, 'HIER ALLES RUHT -  here all is still.'  If it can be said to be still in an engine  factory, or in the stomach of a volcano when it is meditating an  eruption, he might have been justified in what he said, but not  otherwise.  The tumult continued unabated for near an hour; but as  one grew used to it, it gradually resolved itself into three bells,  answering each other at short intervals across the town, a man  shouting, at ever shorter intervals and with superhuman energy,  'FEUER, - IM SACHSENHAUSEN, and the almost continuous winding of  all manner of bugles and trumpets, sometimes in stirring  flourishes, and sometimes in mere tuneless wails.  Occasionally  there was another rush of feet past the window, and once there was  a mighty drumming, down between us and the river, as though the  soldiery were turning out to keep the peace.  This was all we had  of the fire, except a great cloud, all flushed red with the glare,  above the roofs on the other side of the Gasse; but it was quite  enough to put me entirely off my sleep and make me keenly alive to  three or four gentlemen who were strolling leisurely about my  person, and every here and there leaving me somewhat as a keepsake.  . . . However, everything has its compensation, and when day came  at last, and the sparrows awoke with trills and CAROL-ETS, the dawn  seemed to fall on me like a sleeping draught.  I went to the window  and saw the sparrows about the eaves, and a great troop of doves go  strolling up the paven Gasse, seeking what they may devour.  And so  to sleep, despite fleas and fire-alarms and clocks chiming the  hours out of neighbouring houses at all sorts of odd times and with  the most charming want of unanimity.

We have got settled down in Frankfurt, and like the place very  much.  Simpson and I seem to get on very well together.  We suit  each other capitally; and it is an awful joke to be living (two  would-be advocates, and one a baronet) in this supremely mean  abode.

The abode is, however, a great improvement on the hotel, and I  think we shall grow quite fond of it. - Ever your affectionate son,

R. L. STEVENSON.

Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

13 ROSENGASSE, FRANKFURT, TUESDAY MORNING, AUGUST 1872.

. . . Last night I was at the theatre and heard DIE JUDIN (LA  JUIVE), and was thereby terribly excited.  At last, in the middle  of the fifth act, which was perfectly beastly, I had to slope.  I  could stand even seeing the cauldron with the sham fire beneath,  and the two hateful executioners in red; but when at last the  girl's courage breaks down, and, grasping her father's arm, she  cries out - O so shudderfully! - I thought it high time to be out  of that GALERE, and so I do not know yet whether it ends well or  ill; but if I ever afterwards find that they do carry things to the  extremity, I shall think more meanly of my species.  It was raining  and cold outside, so I went into a BIERHALLE, and sat and brooded  over a SCHNITT (half-glass) for nearly an hour.  An opera is far  more REAL than real life to me.  It seems as if stage illusion, and  particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion  of them all - an opera - would never stale upon me.  I wish that  life was an opera.  I should like to LIVE in one; but I don't know  in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted.   Besides, it would soon pall:  imagine asking for three-kreuzer  cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of  your dirty clothes in a sustained and FLOURISHOUS aria.

I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to  you; but not to give you news.  There is a great stir of life, in a  quiet, almost country fashion, all about us here.  Some one is  hammering a beef-steak in the REZ-DE-CHAUSSEE:  there is a great  clink of pitchers and noise of the pump-handle at the public well  in the little square-kin round the corner.  The children, all  seemingly within a month, and certainly none above five, that  always go halting and stumbling up and down the roadway, are  ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the gutter,  trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their  MUTTERSPRACHE; but they, too, make themselves heard from time to  time in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that  comes down to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up  the Gasse.  Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries  (I can see twelve out of our window), and such continual visitation  of grey doves and big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street  into a perfect aviary.

I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles  his baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some  pale slimy nastiness that looks like DEAD PORRIDGE, if you can take  the conception.  These two are his only occupations.  All day long  you can hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or  see him eating when he is not keeping baby.  Besides which, there  comes into his house a continual round of visitors that puts me in  mind of the luncheon hour at home.  As he has thus no ostensible  avocation, we have named him 'the W.S.' to give a flavour of  respectability to the street.

Enough of the Gasse.  The weather is here much colder.  It rained a  good deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to- day, and we can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet  there is no more excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river,  except for cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life.  The Main  is very swift.  In one part of the baths it is next door to  impossible to swim against it, and I suspect that, out in the open,  it would be quite impossible. - Adieu, my dear mother, and believe  me, ever your affectionate son,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

(RENTIER).

Letter:  TO CHARLES BAXTER

17 HERIOT ROW, EDINBURGH, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1873.

MY DEAR BAXTER, - The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now.   On Friday night after leaving you, in the course of conversation,  my father put me one or two questions as to beliefs, which I  candidly answered.  I really hate all lying so much now - a new  found honesty that has somehow come out of my late illness - that I  could not so much as hesitate at the time; but if I had foreseen  the real hell of everything since, I think I should have lied, as I  have done so often before.  I so far thought of my father, but I  had forgotten my mother.  And now! they are both ill, both silent,  both as down in the mouth as if - I can find no simile.  You may  fancy how happy it is for me.  If it were not too late, I think I  could almost find it in my heart to retract, but it is too late;  and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood?  Of course,  it is rougher than hell upon my father, but can I help it?  They  don't see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer;  that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel.  I believe as  much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio:  I am, I  think, as honest as they can be in what I hold.  I have not come  hastily to my views.  I reserve (as I told them) many points until  I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus justly to  be called 'horrible atheist.'

Now, what is to take place?  What a curse I am to my parents!  O  Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just DAMNED the happiness  of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the  world.

What is my life to be at this rate?  What, you rascal?  Answer - I  have a pistol at your throat.  If all that I hold true and most  desire to spread is to be such death, and a worse than death, in  the eyes of my father and mother, what the DEVIL am I to do?

Here is a good heavy cross with a vengeance, and all rough with  rusty nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that have to  carry it alone; I hold the light end, but the heavy burden falls on  these two.

Don't - I don't know what I was going to say.  I am an abject  idiot, which, all things considered, is not remarkable. - Ever your  affectionate and horrible atheist,

R. L. STEVENSON.

 CHAPTER II - STUDENT DAYS - ORDERED SOUTH, SEPTEMBER 1873-JULY 1875

 Letter:  TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

COCKFIELD RECTORY, SUDBURY, SUFFOLK, TUESDAY, JULY 28, 1873.

MY DEAR MOTHER, - I am too happy to be much of a correspondent.   Yesterday we were away to Melford and Lavenham, both exceptionally  placid, beautiful old English towns.  Melford scattered all round a  big green, with an Elizabethan Hall and Park, great screens of  trees that seem twice as high as trees should seem, and everything  else like what ought to be in a novel, and what one never expects  to see in reality, made me cry out how good we were to live in  Scotland, for the many hundredth time.  I cannot get over my  astonishment - indeed, it increases every day - at the hopeless  gulf that there is between England and Scotland, and English and  Scotch.  Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and outlandish  here as I do in France or Germany.  Everything by the wayside, in  the houses, or about the people, strikes me with an unexpected  unfamiliarity:  I walk among surprises, for just where you think  you have them, something wrong turns up.

I got a little Law read yesterday, and some German this morning,  but on the whole there are too many amusements going for much work;  as for correspondence, I have neither heart nor time for it to-day.

R. L. S.

 Letter:  TO MRS. SITWELL

17 HERIOT ROW, EDINBURGH, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1873.

I HAVE been to-day a very long walk with my father through some of  the most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron,  windy sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight.   For it is fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the  greens, and a keen wind in the morning that makes one rather timid  of one's tub when it finds its way indoors.

I was out this evening to call on a friend, and, coming back  through the wet, crowded, lamp-lit streets, was singing after my  own fashion, DU HAST DIAMANTEN UND PERLEN, when I heard a poor  cripple man in the gutter wailing over a pitiful Scotch air, his  club-foot supported on the other knee, and his whole woebegone body  propped sideways against a crutch.  The nearest lamp threw a strong  light on his worn, sordid face and the three boxes of lucifer  matches that he held for sale.  My own false notes stuck in my  chest.  How well off I am! is the burthen of my songs all day long  - DRUM IST SO WOHL MIR IN DER WELT! and the ugly reality of the  cripple man was an intrusion on the beautiful world in which I was  walking.  He could no more sing than I could; and his voice was  cracked and rusty, and altogether perished.  To think that that  wreck may have walked the streets some night years ago, as glad at  heart as I was, and promising himself a future as golden and  honourable!

SUNDAY, 11.20 A.M. - I wonder what you are doing now? - in church  likely, at the TE DEUM.  Everything here is utterly silent.  I can  hear men's footfalls streets away; the whole life of Edinburgh has  been sucked into sundry pious edifices; the gardens below my  windows are steeped in a diffused sunlight, and every tree seems  standing on tiptoes, strained and silent, as though to get its head  above its neighbour's and LISTEN.  You know what I mean, don't you?   How trees do seem silently to assert themselves on an occasion!  I  have been trying to write ROADS until I feel as if I were standing  on my head; but I mean ROADS, and shall do something to them.

I wish I could make you feel the hush that is over everything, only  made the more perfect by rare interruptions; and the rich, placid  light, and the still, autumnal foliage.  Houses, you know, stand  all about our gardens:  solid, steady blocks of houses; all look  empty and asleep.

MONDAY NIGHT. - The drums and fifes up in the Castle are sounding  the guard-call through the dark, and there is a great rattle of  carriages without.  I have had (I must tell you) my bed taken out  of this room, so that I am alone in it with my books and two  tables, and two chairs, and a coal-skuttle (or SCUTTLE) (?) and a  DEBRIS of broken pipes in a corner, and my old school play-box, so  full of papers and books that the lid will not shut down, standing  reproachfully in the midst.  There is something in it that is still  a little gaunt and vacant; it needs a little populous disorder over  it to give it the feel of homeliness, and perhaps a bit more  furniture, just to take the edge off the sense of illimitable  space, eternity, and a future state, and the like, that is brought  home to one, even in this small attic, by the wide, empty floor.

You would require to know, what only I can ever know, many grim and  many maudlin passages out of my past life to feel how great a  change has been made for me by this past summer.  Let me be ever so  poor and thread-paper a soul, I am going to try for the best.

These good booksellers of mine have at last got a WERTHER without  illustrations.  I want you to like Charlotte.  Werther himself has  every feebleness and vice that could tend to make his suicide a  most virtuous and commendable action; and yet I like Werther too -  I don't know why, except that he has written the most delightful  letters in the world.  Note, by the way, the passage under date  June 21st not far from the beginning; it finds a voice for a great  deal of dumb, uneasy, pleasurable longing that we have all had,  times without number.  I looked that up the other day for ROADS, so  I know the reference; but you will find it a garden of flowers from  beginning to end.  All through the passion keeps steadily rising,  from the thunderstorm at the country-house - there was thunder in  that story too - up to the last wild delirious interview; either  Lotte was no good at all, or else Werther should have remained  alive after that; either he knew his woman too well, or else he was  precipitate.  But an idiot like that is hopeless; and yet, he  wasn't an idiot - I make reparation, and will offer eighteen pounds  of best wax at his tomb.  Poor devil! he was only the weakest - or,  at least, a very weak strong man.

R. L. S.

Letter:  TO MRS. SITWELL

17 HERIOT ROW, EDINBURGH, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1873.

. . . I WAS over last night, contrary to my own wish, in Leven,  Fife; and this morning I had a conversation of which, I think, some  account might interest you.  I was up with a cousin who was fishing  in a mill-lade, and a shower of rain drove me for shelter into a  tumbledown steading attached to the mill.  There I found a labourer  cleaning a byre, with whom I fell into talk.  The man was to all  appearance as heavy, as HEBETE, as any English clodhopper; but I  knew I was in Scotland, and launched out forthright into Education  and Politics and the aims of one's life.  I told him how I had  found the peasantry in Suffolk, and added that their state had made  me feel quite pained and down-hearted.  'It but to do that,' he  said, 'to onybody that thinks at a'!'  Then, again, he said that he  could not conceive how anything could daunt or cast down a man who  had an aim in life.  'They that have had a guid schoolin' and do  nae mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him that has aye  something ayont need never be weary.'  I have had to mutilate the  dialect much, so that it might be comprehensible to you; but I  think the sentiment will keep, even through a change of words,  something of the heartsome ring of encouragement that it had for  me:  and that from a man cleaning a byre!  You see what John Knox  and his schools have done.