his work was chiefly on the annals of his
family and on the tale _St. Ives_. The latter he found uphill work:
after the first ten or twelve chapters, which are in his happiest vein,
the narrative, as he himself was painfully aware, began to flag. Towards
the end of October he gave it up for the time being and turned to a more
arduous task, the tragic _Weir of Hermiston_. On this theme he felt his
inspiration return, and during the month of November and the first days
of December wrought once more at the full pitch of his powers and in the
conscious delight of their exercise. On the third of December, after a
morning of happy work and pleasant correspondence, he was seen gazing
long and wistfully toward the forest-clad mountain, on a ledge of which
he had desired that he should be buried. In the afternoon he brought his
morning's work to his wife, the most exacting of his critics; asked her
whether it was not well done; and in her glow of admiring assent found
his confirmation and his reward. Nevertheless she could not throw off an
oppressive sense of coming calamity. He was reassuring her with gay and
laughing talk when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain
laid him almost in a moment unconscious at her feet; and before two
hours were over he had passed away. All the world knows how his body was
carried by the loving hands of his native servants to the burial-place
of his choice, and rests there with the words of his own requiem
engraved on his tomb--the words which we have seen him putting on paper
when he was at grips with death fifteen years before in California--

"Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

TO CHARLES BAXTER

Mr. Baxter, after much preliminary consideration and inquiry, had
matured and submitted to Stevenson the scheme of the Edinburgh
edition, to which this letter is his reply. The paper on _Treasure
Island_ appeared in the Idler for August 1889, and was afterwards
reprinted in the miscellany _My First Book_ (Chatto and Windus,
1894). See Edinburgh edition, _Miscellanies_, vol. iv. p. 285.

_1st January '94._

MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am delighted with your idea, and first, I will here
give an amended plan and afterwards give you a note of some of the
difficulties.

[Plan of the Edinburgh edition--14 vols.]

... It may be a question whether my Times letters might not be appended
to the _Footnote_ with a note of the d