I love my native
air, but it does not love me; and the end of this delightful period was
a cold, a fly-blister and a migration by Strathardle and Glenshee to the
Castleton of Braemar. There it blew a good deal and rained in a
proportion; my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I
must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a
house lugubriously known as the Late Miss M^cGregor's Cottage. And now
admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late
Miss M^cGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of
"something craggy to break his mind upon." He had no thought of
literature; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting
suffrages; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of
watercolours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a
picture-gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be
showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to
speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous
emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions, I made
the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully
coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and, with the unconsciousness of
the predestined, I ticketed my performance "Treasure Island." I am told
there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.
The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and
rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up
hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries,
perhaps the _Standing Stone_ or the _Druidic Circle_ on the heath; here
is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or
twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must
remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal
forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this
way, as I paused upon my map of "Treasure Island," the future character
of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and
their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected
quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on
these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I
had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters. How
often have I