I am now on another lay for the moment, purely owing to
Lloyd this one; but I believe there's more coin in it than
in any amount of crawlers. Now see here "The Sea Cook or
Treasure Island: A Story for Boys." [This was the first
title selected for the book.]

If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten
since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is
about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow
public house on the Devon coast, that it's all about a map
and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship and a
current and a fine old Squire Trelawney, (the real Tre.
purged of literature and sin to suit the infant mind,) and
a doctor and another doctor and a sea cook with one leg and
and a sea song with a chorus, "Yo-ho-ho and a Bottle of
Rum," (at the third "ho" you heave at the capstan bars,)
which is a real buccaneer's song, only known to the crew of
the late Capt. Flint, who died of rum at Key West much
regretted?

The first publication of "Treasure Island" was in 1883, and in a
letter to Sidney Colvin in July, 1884, Stevenson writes: "'Treasure
Island' came out of Kingsley's 'At Last,' where I got 'The Dead
Man's Chest.'"

* * * * *

THE UNPUBLISHED LETTER

_New York Times Review of Books_,

It has been my great pleasure and satisfaction to sit with Young E.
Allison of Louisville in business intimacy and friendship for many
years, and to have seen the inception of his "Derelict" in three
verses based on Billy Bones' song of "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's
Chest" from "Treasure Island." During this intimacy also I have
observed those original three stanzas grow to six and viewed the
adjustment and balance and polish he has given to what I now
consider a masterpiece.

No one who ever read "Treasure Island" with a mind, but feels there
is something lacking in Billy Bones' song. It left a haunting wish
for more and if the book was closed with a single regret it was
because Billy Bones had not completed his weird chant. So it
affected Mr. Allison, a confirmed novel reader and a great admirer
of Stevenson. Henry Waller, collaborating with Mr. Allison in the
production[13] of the "Ogallallas" by the Bostonians along back in
1891, declared he ha