make it a museum of bright recollections; so that we may go back there
white-headed, and say "Vixi." After all, new countries, sun, music, and
all the rest can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city
out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom
of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for
these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there--say, in
Advocate's Close!

Simpson and I got on very well together, and made a very suitable pair.
I like him much better than I did when I started which was almost more
than I hoped for.

If you should chance to see Bob, give him my news or if you have the
letter about you, let him see it.--Ever your Affct. friend,

R. L. STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

Through the jesting tenor of this letter is to be discerned a vein of
more than half serious thinking very characteristic of R. L. S. alike
as youth and man.

_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, October 1872._

MY DEAR BAXTER,--I am gum-boiled and face swollen to an unprecedented
degree. It is very depressing to suffer from gibber that cannot be
brought to a head. I cannot speak it, because my face is so swollen and
stiff that enunciation must be deliberate--a thing your true gibberer
cannot hold up his head under; and writ gibber is somehow not gibber at
all, it does not come forth, does not _flow_, with that fine irrational
freedom that it loves in speech--it does not afford relief to the packed
bosom.

Hence I am suffering from _suppressed gibber_--an uneasy complaint; and
like all cases of suppressed humours, this hath a nasty tendency to the
brain. Therefore (the more confused I get, the more I lean on Thus's and
Hences and Therefores) you must not be down upon me, most noble Festus,
altho' this letter should smack of some infirmity of judgment. I speak
the words of soberness and truth; and would you were not almost but
altogether as I am, except this swelling. Lord, Lord, if we could change
personalities how we should hate it. How I should rebel at the office,
repugn under the Ulster coat, and repudiate your monkish humours thus
unjustly and suddenly thrust upon poor, infidel me! And as for you--why,
my dear Charles, "a mouse that hath its lodging in a cat's ear" would
not be so uneasy as you in your new conditions. I do not see how your
temperament would come thro' the feverish longings to do things that
cannot then (or perhaps e