too tasted of our
common frailty. "O, Iago, the pity of it!" The least tender should be
moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer. And all that you could
do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!

Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your
own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer. You had a
father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it
to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your
emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that
you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the
author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to
publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried to do what
Damien did is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and
the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God
had given you grace to see it.

FOOTNOTE:

[32] From the Sydney _Presbyterian_, October 26, 1889.

XI

MY FIRST BOOK--"TREASURE ISLAND"

It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist
alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards
what else I have written with indifference, if not aversion; if it call
upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indelible character;
and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world
but what is meant is my first novel.

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems
vain to ask why. Men are born with various manias: from my earliest
childhood it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events;
and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the
papermakers. Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of
"Rathillet," "The Pentland Rising,"[33] "The King's Pardon" (otherwise
"Park Whitehead"), "Edward Daven," "A Country Dance," and "A Vendetta in
the West"; and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now all
ashes, and have been received again into the soil. I have named but a few
of my ill-fated efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they
were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of years.
"Rathillet" was attempted before fifteen, "The Vendetta" at twenty-nine,
and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one. By
that time I had written little books and little essays and short stories;