ine of suggestion.

FOOTNOTE:

[33] _Ne pas confondre_. Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint
of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement from the
book-lists) the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy
prices; but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance without a
spark of merit and now deleted from the world.--[R. L. S.]

XII

THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE"

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very
dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of
forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending
with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among
the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation.
For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved
with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth
perusal of "The Phantom Ship." "Come," said I to my engine, "let us make
a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
savagery, and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large
features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the
book you have been reading and admiring." I was here brought up with a
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I
failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton,
and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject;
so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me
cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar
belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course
of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a
buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle
of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.

On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below
zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had seen
the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the
Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border.
Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two countries, two
of the ends of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of the
resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general acce