parts, pendicles and appurtenances. There
is a very little work to do except some little entertaining, to which I
am bound to say my family and in particular the amanuensis who now
guides the pen look forward with delight; I with manly resignation. The
real reasons for the step would be three: 1st, possibility of being able
to do some good, or at least certainty of not being obliged to stand
always looking on helplessly at what is bad: 2nd, larks for the family:
3rd, and perhaps not altogether least, a house in town and a boat and a
boat's crew.[44]

But I find I have left out another reason: 4th, growing desire on the
part of the old man virulent for anything in the nature of a
salary--years seem to invest that idea with new beauty.

I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that
would come in--mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the
immortal mind of man. What I want is the income that really comes in of
itself while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on
chairs. Think how beautiful it would be not to have to mind the critics,
and not even the darkest of the crowd--Sidney Colvin. I should probably
amuse myself with works that would make your hair curl, if you had any
left.

R. L. S.

TO T. W. DOVER

Stevenson's correspondent in this case is an artisan, who had been
struck by the truth of a remark in his essay on _Beggars_ that it is
only or mainly the poor who habitually give to the poor; and who
wrote to ask whether it was from experience that Stevenson knew this.

_Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa, June 20th, 1892._

SIR,--In reply to your very interesting letter, I cannot fairly say that
I have ever been poor, or known what it was to want a meal. I have been
reduced, however, to a very small sum of money, with no apparent
prospect of increasing it; and at that time I reduced myself to
practically one meal a day, with the most disgusting consequences to my
health. At this time I lodged in the house of a working-man, and
associated much with others. At the same time, from my youth up, I have
always been a good deal and rather intimately thrown among the
working-classes, partly as a civil engineer in out-of-the-way places,
partly from a strong and, I hope, not ill-favoured sentiment of
curiosity. But the place where, perhaps, I was most struck with the fact
upon which you comment was the house of a friend, who was exceedingly