the ship of man begins to fill upon
the other tack.

Here is a sermon, by your leave! It is your own fault, you have amused
and interested me so much by your breath of the New Youth, which comes
to me from so far away, where I live up here in my mountain, and secret
messengers bring me letters from rebels, and the government sometimes
seizes them, and generally grumbles in its beard that Stevenson should
really be deported. O my life is the more lively, never fear!

It has recently been most amusingly varied by a visit from Lady Jersey.
I took her over mysteriously (under the pseudonym of my cousin, Miss
Amelia Balfour) to visit Mataafa, our rebel; and we had great fun, and
wrote a Ouida novel on our life here, in which every author had to
describe himself in the Ouida glamour, and of which--for the Jerseys
intend printing it--I must let you have a copy. My wife's chapter, and
my description of myself, should, I think, amuse you. But there were
finer touches still; as when Belle and Lady Jersey came out to brush
their teeth in front of the rebel King's palace, and the night guard
squatted opposite on the grass and watched the process; or when I and my
interpreter, and the King with his secretary, mysteriously disappeared
to conspire.--Ever yours sincerely,

R. L. STEVENSON.

TO THE CHILDREN IN THE CELLAR

This time the children in the Kilburn cellar are addressed direct,
with only a brief word at the end to their instructress.

_Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, September 4th, 1892._

DEAR CHILDREN IN THE CELLAR,--I told you before something of the black
boys who come here for work on the plantations, and some of whom run
away and live a wild life in the forests of the islands. Now I want to
tell you of one who lived in the house of the lean man. Like the rest of
them here, he is a little fellow, and when he goes about in old,
battered, cheap European clothes, looks very small and shabby. When
first he came he was as lean as a tobacco-pipe, and his smile (like that
of almost all the others) was the sort that makes you half wish to smile
yourself, and half wish to cry. However, the boys in the kitchen took
him in hand and fed him up. They would set him down alone to table and
wait upon him till he had his fill, which was a good long time to wait;
and the first thing we noticed was that his little stomach began to
stick out like a pigeon's breast; and then the food got a little wider
spr