ing streets until near dinner time.

I have finished _Roads_ to-day, and send it off to you to see. The Lord
knows whether it is worth anything!--some of it pleases me a good deal,
but I fear it is quite unfit for any possible magazine. However, I wish
you to see it, as you know the humour in which it was conceived, walking
alone and very happily about the Suffolk highways and byeways on several
splendid sunny afternoons.--Believe me, ever your faithful friend,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_Monday._--I have looked over _Roads_ again, and I am aghast at its
feebleness. It is the trial of a very "'prentice hand" indeed. Shall I
ever learn to do anything _well_? However, it shall go to you, for the
reasons given above.

TO MRS SITWELL

After an outpouring about difficulties at home.

_Edinburgh, Tuesday, September 16, 1873._

... I must be very strong to have all this vexation and still to be
well. I was weighed the other day, and the gross weight of my large
person was eight stone six! Does it not seem surprising that I can keep
the lamp alight, through all this gusty weather, in so frail a lantern?
And yet it burns cheerily.

My mother is leaving for the country this morning, and my father and I
will be alone for the best part of the week in this house. Then on
Friday I go south to Dumfries till Monday. I must write small, or I
shall have a tremendous budget by then.

7.20 _p.m._--I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going down to
Portobello in the train, when there came into the next compartment
(third class) an artisan, strongly marked with smallpox, and with
sunken, heavy eyes--a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely.
There was a woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with
her one eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian,
and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was
something beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some
Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They
talked for a while together through the window; the man seemed to have
been asking money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave ye two
shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said----" it died off into whisper.
Plainly Falstaff and Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed
unpleasantly, even cruelly, and said something; and the woman turned
her back on the carriage and stood a long while so, and, do what I
might