our mouth any
more about getting liberty by being ill and going south _via_ the
sickbed. It is not the old free-born bird that gets thus to freedom; but
I know not what manacled and hide-bound spirit, incapable of pleasure,
the clay of a man. Go south! Why, I saw more beauty with my eyes
healthfully alert to see in two wet windy February afternoons in
Scotland than I can see in my beautiful olive gardens and grey hills in
a whole week in my low and lost estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it
somewhere. It is a pitiable blindness, this blindness of the soul; I
hope it may not be long with me. So remember to keep well; and remember
rather anything than not to keep well; and again I say, _anything_
rather than not to keep well.

Not that I am unhappy, mind you. I have found the words already--placid
and inert, that is what I am. I sit in the sun and enjoy the tingle all
over me, and I am cheerfully ready to concur with any one who says that
this is a beautiful place, and I have a sneaking partiality for the
newspapers, which would be all very well, if one had not fallen from
heaven and were not troubled with some reminiscence of the _ineffable
aurore_.

To sit by the sea and to be conscious of nothing but the sound of the
waves, and the sunshine over all your body, is not unpleasant; but I was
an Archangel once.

_Friday._--If you knew how old I felt! I am sure this is what age brings
with it--this carelessness, this disenchantment, this continual bodily
weariness. I am a man of seventy: O Medea, kill me, or make me young
again![9]

To-day has been cloudy and mild; and I have lain a great while on a
bench outside the garden wall (my usual place now) and looked at the
dove-coloured sea and the broken roof of cloud, but there was no seeing
in my eye. Let us hope to-morrow will be more profitable.

R. L. S.

TO MRS. SITWELL

The history of the scruples and ideas of duty in regard to money
expressed in the following letter is set forth and further explained
in retrospect in the fragment called _Lay Morals_, written in 1879.
The Walt Whitman essay here mentioned is not that afterwards printed
in _Men and Books_, but an earlier and more enthusiastic version. Mr.
Dowson (of whom Stevenson lost sight after these Riviera days) was
the father of the unfortunate poet Ernest Dowson. His acquaintance
was the first result of Stevenson's search for "anyone conversable"
in the hotel.