--Advice on
Going to America--A Statue to Washington--Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.--Robert
Louis Stevenson--Mr Edmund Gosse on the Neo-Scottish School--
_My Contemporaries in Fiction_--Sir A. Conan Doyle--Mr.
Joseph Hocking--Robert Buchanan--Mr. E. Marshall Hall, K.C.

[Illustration: Meredith1]

[Illustration: Meredith2]

[Illustration: Meredith3]

[Illustration: Meredith4]

_Copy of Letter to David Christie Murray. 15th December
1893._

My Dear Christie Murray,--Your book (my book) followed me up
here, where I had to come unexpectedly two days after our
dinner. It is delightful. I accept your challenge, and do
hereby undertake to talk to you at tremendous length the
first time we meet again about the making of another
novelist. Not that he, worse luck, has had anything like
such varied experiences. I hope you will go on with the
second volume you promise. You will find a capital chapter
for it in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ Xmas number. I thought
that dog worth all the Xmas tales I have read this year. Its
death is almost unbearably pathetic, and so comic all the
time. The illustrator rose to his chances in one picture,
when Punch struts past the bull-dog. The one thing I wonder
at is what you say of acting, I would argue that everyone
with imagination must find delight in the stage, but I can't
understand the author of _Aunt Rachel_ having a desire, or
rather a passion, to exchange a greater art for a smaller
one. It is not smaller, you hold. But surely it is, as the
pianist is less than the composer. I need not tell you again
what it is to me to have the dedication. The whole
arrangement of this house has been altered to give the book
its place of honour, the positions of hundreds of books has
been altered, the bringing of a small bookcase into a
different room led to the alteration of heavy furniture in
the other room, a sofa is where was a cupboard, flowerpots
have been brought inside, and red curtains have given place
to green. This is a fact.

I hope you are flourishing, and with best regards to Mrs.
Murray,--Yours ever,

(Sgd.) J. M. Barrie.

_Letter of Advice sent by a Distinguished American to David
Christie Murray prior to a visit to America on a Lecturing