sy style. Compare it
with the almost contemporary "Merry Men"; one reader may prefer the one
style, one the other--'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but
no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the
other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out "Treasure Island" at
so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not
my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters;
and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost
hold. My mouth was empty; there was not one word of "Treasure Island" in
my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me
at the "Hand and Spear"! Then I corrected them, living for the most part
alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good
deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict
to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I was
the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way,
never yet made L200 a year; my father had quite recently bought back and
cancelled a book that was judged a failure: was this to be another and
last fiasco? I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth
hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter,
had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the
novels of M. du Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one
morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like
small-talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at the
rate of a chapter a day, I finished "Treasure Island." It had to be
transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained
alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly
mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance. He was at that
time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus: so far
out may be the judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was
scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story. He was
large-minded; "a full man," if there was one; but the very name of my
enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and
solecisms of style. Well! he was not far wrong.

"Treasure Island"--it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title,
"The Sea Cook"--appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in