d my last; and I know you will
repent when you hear how near I have been to another world. For about
six weeks I have been in utter doubt; it was a toss-up for life or death
all that time; but I won the toss, sir, and Hades went off once more
discomfited. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that I
have a friendly game with that gentleman. I know he will end by cleaning
me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit of that sort of
gambling seems to be a part of my nature; it was, I suspect, too much
indulged in youth; break your children of this tendency, my dear Gosse,
from the first. It is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than
opium--I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been very very
sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating
attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the power of speech,
fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease; and I have
cause to bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford (a name
the Muse repels), that I have come out of all this, and got my feet once
more upon a little hilltop, with a fair prospect of life and some new
desire of living. Yet I did not wish to die, neither; only I felt unable
to go on farther with that rough horseplay of human life: a man must be
pretty well to take the business in good part. Yet I felt all the time
that I had done nothing to entitle me to an honourable discharge; that I
had taken up many obligations and begun many friendships which I had no
right to put away from me; and that for me to die was to play the cur
and slinking sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the decisive
fight. Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and
here you can triumph. I have been reduced to writing verses for
amusement. A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after
all. But I'll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the
heart to burn them while I live. Do write. I shall go to the mountains
as soon as the weather clears; on the way thither, I marry myself; then
I set up my family altar among the pine-woods, 3,000 feet, sir, from the
disputatious sea.--I am, dear Weg, most truly yours,

R. L. S.

TO DR. W. BAMFORD

With a copy of _Travels with a Donkey_.

[_San Francisco, April 1880._]

My dear Sir,--Will you let me offer you this little book? If I had
anything better, it should be yours. May you not dislike it, for it w