ea have occurred to us in those days when we used to search our
pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce
the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, or wander down the
Lothian Road without any, than that I should be strong and well at the
age of forty-three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at
home bringing out the Edinburgh Edition? If it had been possible, I
should almost have preferred the Lothian Road Edition, say, with a
picture of the old Dutch smuggler on the covers. I have now something
heavy on my mind. I had always a great sense of kinship with poor Robert
Fergusson--so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so
unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and, as I always felt,
rather by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself. Now the
injustice with which the one Robert is rewarded and the other left out
in the cold sits heavy on me, and I wish you could think of some way in
which I could do honour to my unfortunate namesake. Do you think it
would look like affectation to dedicate the whole edition to his memory?
I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too
abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive
the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd--it
really looks like the transmigration of souls--I feel that I must do
something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone.
It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what
condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it,
and perhaps add a few words of inscription.

I must tell you, what I just remembered in a flash as I was walking
about dictating this letter--there was in the original plan of the
_Master of Ballantrae_ a sort of introduction describing my arrival in
Edinburgh on a visit to yourself and your placing in my hands the papers
of the story. I actually wrote it, and then condemned the idea--as being
a little too like Scott, I suppose. Now I must really find the MS. and
try to finish it for the E.E. It will give you, what I should so much
like you to have, another corner of your own in that lofty monument.

Suppose we do what I have proposed about Fergusson's monument, I wonder
if an inscription like this would look arrogant--

This stone originally erected
by Robert Burns has been
repaired at the
charges of Robert Louis Stevenson,
and is