rvous, and conceived a plan. How if he should
put dynamite under the gaol, and in case of an attempted rescue blow up
prison and all? He went to the President, who agreed; he went to the
American man-of-war for the dynamite and machine, was refused, and got
it at last from the Wreckers. The thing began to leak out, and there
arose a muttering in town. People had no fancy for amateur explosions,
for one thing. For another, it did not clearly appear that it was legal;
the men had been condemned to six months' prison, which they were
peaceably undergoing; they had not been condemned to death. And lastly,
it seemed a somewhat advanced example of civilisation to set before
barbarians. The mutter in short became a storm, and yesterday, while I
was down, a cutter was chartered, and the prisoners were suddenly
banished to the Tokelaus. Who has changed the sentence? We are going to
stir in the dynamite matter; we do not want the natives to fancy us
consenting to such an outrage.

Fanny has returned from her trip, and on the whole looks better. The
_High Woods_ are under way, and their name is now the _Beach of Falesa_,
and the yarn is cured. I have about thirty pages of it done; it will be
fifty to seventy I suppose. No supernatural trick at all; and escaped
out of it quite easily; can't think why I was so stupid for so long.
Mighty glad to have Fanny back to this "Hell of the South Seas," as the
German Captain called it. What will Cedercrantz think when he comes
back? To do him justice, had he been here, this Manono hash would not
have been.

Here is a pretty thing. When Fanny was in Fiji all the Samoa and Tokelau
folks were agog about our "flash" house; but the whites had never heard
of it.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
Author of _The Beach of Falesa_.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

_[Vailima], Sept. 28, 1891._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--Since I last laid down my pen, I have written and
rewritten _The Beach of Falesa_; something like sixty thousand words of
sterling domestic fiction (the story, you will understand, is only half
that length); and now I don't want to write any more again for ever, or
feel so; and I've got to overhaul it once again to my sorrow. I was all
yesterday revising, and found a lot of slacknesses and (what is worse in
this kind of thing) some literaryisms. One of the puzzles is this: It is
a first person story--a trader telling his own adventure in an island.
When I began I allowed myself a few libe