ptation, or
even (as I have since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with my
design of a tale of many lands; and this decided me to consider further
of its possibilities. The man who should thus be buried was the first
question: a good man, whose return to life would be hailed by the reader
and the other characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian
picture and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any use at
all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and
family, take him through many disappearances, and make this final
restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American wilderness, the
last and the grimmest of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the
craft that I was now in the most interesting moment of an author's life;
the hours that followed that night upon the balcony, and the following
nights and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were
hours of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me
alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who
is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up at
all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies.

And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold
I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge
hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was
there ever a more complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here,
thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution or
perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final
Tableau of a story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry
and Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell
of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole
correspondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago,
so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual
tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.

My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being
all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in
books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my
club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally
Occidental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to
get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I
believe t