er some, and never to sink up to my
eyes in comfort and grow dead in virtues and respectability. I am a bad
man by nature, I suppose; but I cannot be good without suffering a
little. And the end of life, you will ask? The pleasurable death of
self: a thing not to be attained, because it is a thing belonging to
Heaven. All this apropos of that good, weak, feverish, fine spirit, ----
----. We have traits in common; we have almost the same strength and
weakness intermingled; and if I had not come through a very hot
crucible, I should be just as feverish. My sufferings have been
healthier than his; mine have been always a choice, where a man could be
manly; his have been so too, if he knew it, but were not so upon the
face; hence a morbid strain, which his wounded vanity has helped to
embitter.

I wonder why I scratch every one to-day. And I believe it is because I
am conscious of so much truth in your strictures on my damned stuff. I
don't care; there is something in me worth saying, though I can't find
what it is just yet; and ere I die, if I do not die too fast, I shall
write something worth the boards, which with scarce an exception I have
not yet done. At the same time, dear boy, in a matter of vastly more
importance than Opera Omnia Ludovici Stevenson, I mean my life, I have
not been a perfect cad; God help me to be less and less so as the days
go on.

The _Emigrant_ is not good, and will never do for P.M.G., though it must
have a kind of rude interest. R. L. S.

I am now quite an American--yellow envelopes.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

_608 Bush Street, San Francisco [December 26, 1879]._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am now writing to you in a cafe waiting for some
music to begin. For four days I have spoken to no one but to my landlady
or landlord or to restaurant waiters. This is not a gay way to pass
Christmas, is it? and I must own the guts are a little knocked out of
me. If I could work, I could worry through better. But I have no style
at command for the moment, with the second part of the _Emigrant_, the
last of the novel, the essay on Thoreau, and God knows all, waiting for
me. But I trust something can be done with the first part, or, by God,
I'll starve here....[25]

O Colvin, you don't know how much good I have done myself. I feared to
think this out by myself. I have made a base use of you, and it comes
out so much better than I had dreamed. But I have to stick to work now;
and here's December gone pre