he
kindest, and the most genial men I ever knew. I shall always remember
his brisk, cordial ways and the essential goodness which he showed me
whenever we met with gratitude. And the always is such a little while
now! He is another of the landmarks gone; when it comes to my own turn
to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue; and
whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my
fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine. And these deaths
make me think of it with an ever greater readiness. Strange that you
should be beginning a new life, when I, who am a little your junior, am
thinking of the end of mine. But I have had hard lines; I have been so
long waiting for death, I have unwrapped my thoughts from about life so
long, that I have not a filament left to hold by; I have done my
fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost forgotten to play,
and can only wait for the eruption, and think it long of coming.
Literally, no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's
good fun.

R. L. S.

TO R. A. M. STEVENSON

Stevenson had received from his cousin a letter announcing, among
other things, the birth of a son to the writer, and rambling
suggestively, as may be guessed from the following reply, over many
disconnected themes: the ethnology of Scotland, paternity and
heredity, civilisation _versus_ primitive customs and instincts, the
story of their own descent, the method of writing in collaboration,
education, Christianity and sex, the religion of conduct, anarchism,
etc.; all which matters are here discursively touched on. "Old Skene"
is, of course, the distinguished Scottish antiquarian and historian,
William Forbes Skene, in whose firm (Skene & Edwards, W.S.) Stevenson
had for a time served irregularly enough as an unpaid clerk.

[_Vailima, September 1894._]

DEAR BOB,--You are in error about the Picts. They were a Gaelic race,
spoke a Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they
were blacker than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly
Celts; their name shows it--the "cold croft," it means; so does their
country. Where the _black_ Scotch come from nobody knows; but I
recognise with you the fact that the whole of Britain is rapidly and
progressively becoming more pigmented; already in one man's life I can
decidedly trace a difference in the children about a scho