life,
which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the
Lord preparing your way to Vailima--in the desert, certainly--in the
desert of Cough and by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever--but whither
that way points there can be no question--and there will be a meeting of
the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune and the Devil.
_Absit omen!_

My dear Barrie, I am a little in the dark about this new work of yours:[79]
what is to become of me afterwards? You say carefully--methought
anxiously--that I was no longer me when I grew up? I cannot bear this
suspense: what is it? It's no forgery? And AM I HANGIT? These are the
elements of a very pretty lawsuit which you had better come to Samoa to
compromise. I am enjoying a great pleasure that I had long looked
forward to, reading Orme's _History of Indostan_; I had been looking out
for it everywhere; but at last, in four volumes, large quarto,
beautiful type and page, and with a delectable set of maps and plans,
and all the names of the places wrongly spelled--it came to Samoa,
little Barrie. I tell you frankly, you had better come soon. I am sair
failed a'ready; and what I may be if you continue to dally, I dread to
conceive. I may be speechless; already, or at least for a month or so,
I'm little better than a teetoller--I beg pardon, a teetotaller. It is
not exactly physical, for I am in good health, working four or five
hours a day in my plantation, and intending to ride a paper-chase next
Sunday--ay, man, that's a fact, and I havena had the hert to breathe it
to my mother yet--the obligation's poleetical, for I am trying every
means to live well with my German neighbours--and, O Barrie, but it's no
easy!... To be sure, there are many exceptions. And the whole of the
above must be regarded as private--strictly private. Breathe it not in
Kirriemuir: tell it not to the daughters of Dundee! What a nice extract
this would make for the daily papers! and how it would facilitate my
position here!

_August 5th._--This is Sunday, the Lord's Day. "The hour of attack
approaches." And it is a singular consideration what I risk; I may yet
be the subject of a tract, and a good tract too--such as one which I
remember reading with recreant awe and rising hair in my youth, of a boy
who was a very good boy, and went to Sunday Schule, and one day kipped
from it, and went and actually bathed, and was dashed over a waterfall,
and he was the only son of his mo