d halfpenny meal, taken in the middle of the day, the
poor man's hour; and I shall eat and drink to your prosperity.--Ever
yours,

R. L. S.

TO PROFESSOR MEIKLEJOHN

One day at the Savile Club, Stevenson, hearing a certain laugh, cried
out that he must know the laugher, who turned out to be a
fellow-countryman, the late John Meiklejohn, the well-known
educational authority and professor at St. Andrews University.
Stevenson introduced himself, and the two became firm friends.
Allusion was made a few pages back to a letter from Professor
Meiklejohn about the _Burns_ essay.

_608 Bush Street, San Francisco, California, Feb. 1st, 1880._

MY DEAR MEIKLEJOHN,--You must think me a thankless fellow by this time;
but if you knew how harassed and how sick I had been, and how I have
twice begun to write to you already, you might condescend to forgive the
puir gangrel body. To tell you what I have been doing, thinking, and
coming through these six or seven months would exhilarate nobody: least
of all me. _Infandum jubes_, so I hope you won't. I have done a great
deal of work, but perhaps my health of mind and body should not let me
expect much from what I have done. At least I have turned the corner; my
feet are on the rock again, I believe, and I shall continue to pour
forth pure and wholesome literature for the masses as per invoice.

I am glad you liked _Burns_; I think it is the best thing I ever did.
Did not the national vanity exclaim? Do you know what Shairp thought? I
think I let him down gently, did I not?

I have done a _Thoreau_, which I hope you may like, though I have a
feeling that perhaps it might be better. Please look out for a little
paper called _Yoshida Torajiro_, which, I hope, will appear in Cornhill
ere very long; the subject, at least, will interest you. I am to appear
in the same magazine with a real "blood and bones in the name of God"
story. Why Stephen took it, is to me a mystery; anyhow, it was fun to
write, and if you can interest a person for an hour and a half, you have
not been idle. When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them
like opium; and I consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of
the mind. And frankly, Meiklejohn, it is not Shakespeare we take to,
when we are in a hot corner; nor, certainly, George Eliot--no, nor even
Balzac. It is Charles Reade, or old Dumas, or the Arabian Nights, or the
best of Walter Scott; it is storie