r nothing about what we did or said, with one
exception, which is not going to be published. I heard of him, writing
essays in the _Portfolio_ and the _Cornhill_, those delightful views of
life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid, so wise, so exquisite,
which all should know. How we looked for "R. L. S." at the end of an
article, and how devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young
one!

About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received a
brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, in his
essay on his old college magazine, he called "Glasgow Brown." What his
real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never knew. G.
B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper. Would I contribute? G. B.
came to see me. Mr. Stevenson has described him, _not_ as I would have
described him: like Mr. Bill Sikes's dog, I have the Christian
peculiarity of not liking dogs "as are not of my breed." G. B.'s paper,
_London_, was to start next week. He had no writer of political leading
articles. Would I do a "leader"? But I was _not_ in favour of Lord
Lytton's Afghan policy. How could I do a Tory leader? Well, I did a
neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes! I found
presently some other scribes for G. B.

What a paper that was! I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of gold,
in handfuls of bank-notes. Nobody ever read _London_, or advertised in
it, or heard of it. It was full of the most wonderfully clever verses in
old French forms. They were (it afterwards appeared) by Mr. W. E.
Henley. Mr. Stevenson himself astonished and delighted the public of
_London_ (that is, the contributors) by his "New Arabian Nights." Nobody
knew about them but ourselves, a fortunate few. Poor G. B. died and Mr.
Henley became the editor. I may not name the contributors, the flower of
the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new race. But one lion, a
distinguished and learned lion, said already that fiction, not essay, was
Mr. Stevenson's field. Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say
whether I would be more sorry to lose _Virginibus Puerisque_ and "Studies
of Men and Books," or "Treasure Island" and "Catriona." With the decease
of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, _London_ struggled
and disappeared.

Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Saville Club, in
Saville Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoki