begin_. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until
the book shall be accomplished! For so long a time, the slant is to
continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you
must keep at command the same quality of style: for so long a time your
puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! I
remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel
with a sort of veneration, as a feat--not possibly of literature--but
at least of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.

[Illustration: drawing by A. S. Boyd

signed: Sincerely yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson]

[Illustration: MR. STEVENSON'S HOUSE IN SAMOA]

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at Kinnaird,
above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors and by the side of the
golden burn; the rude, pure air of our mountains inspirited, if it did
not inspire us, and my wife and I projected a joint volume of logic
stories, for which she wrote 'The Shadow on the Bed,' and I turned out
'Thrawn Janet' and a first draft of 'The Merry Men.' 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 Strathairdle 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 McGregor's Cottage. And now
admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the Late
Miss McGregor'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 water
colours, 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
performa