ise next spring (if we're all alive and jolly) by Loing and Loire,
Saone and Rhone to the Mediterranean. It should make a jolly book of
gossip, I imagine.

God bless you.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_P.S._--_Virginibus Puerisque_ is in August Cornhill. _Charles of
Orleans_ is finished, and sent to Stephen; _Idlers_ ditto, and sent to
Grove; but I've no word of either. So I've not been idle.

R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

In a well-known passage of the _Inland Voyage_ the following incident
is related to the same purport, but in another style:--

_Chauny, Aisne [September 1876]._

MY DEAR HENLEY,--Here I am, you see; and if you will take to a map, you
will observe I am already more than two doors from Antwerp, whence I
started. I have fought it through under the worst weather I ever saw in
France; I have been wet through nearly every day of travel since the
second (inclusive); besides this, I have had to fight against pretty
mouldy health; so that, on the whole, the essayist and reviewer has
shown, I think, some pluck. Four days ago I was not a hundred miles from
being miserably drowned, to the immense regret of a large circle of
friends and the permanent impoverishment of British Essayism and
Reviewery. My boat culbutted me under a fallen tree in a very rapid
current; and I was a good while before I got on to the outside of that
fallen tree; rather a better while than I cared about. When I got up, I
lay some time on my belly, panting, and exuded fluid. All my symptoms
_jusqu' ici_ are trifling. But I've a damned sore throat.--Yours ever,

R. L. S.

TO MRS. SITWELL

Part of _The Hair Trunk_ still exists in MS. It contains some
tolerable fooling, but is chiefly interesting from the fact that the
seat of the proposed Bohemian colony from Cambridge is to be in the
Navigator Islands; showing the direction which had been given to
Stevenson's thoughts by the conversation of the New Zealand official,
Mr. Seed, two years before.

_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, May 1877._

... A perfect chorus of repudiation is sounding in my ears; and although
you say nothing, I know you must be repudiating me, all the same. Write
I cannot--there's no good mincing matters, a letter frightens me worse
than the devil; and I am just as unfit for correspondence as if I had
never learned the three R.'s.

Let me give my news quickly before I relapse into my usual idleness. I
h