assage of Defoe and one in _Treasure Island_.

[_Hotel Chabassiere, Royat, July 1884._]

... Here is a quaint thing, I have read _Robinson_, _Colonel Jack_,
_Moll Flanders_, _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, _History of the Plague_,
_History of the Great Storm_, _Scotch Church and Union_. And there my
knowledge of Defoe ends--except a book, the name of which I forget,
about Peterborough in Spain, which Defoe obviously did not write, and
could not have written if he wanted. To which of these does B. J. refer?
I guess it must be the history of the Scottish Church. I jest; for, of
course, I _know_ it must be a book I have never read, and which this
makes me keen to read--I mean _Captain Singleton_. Can it be got and
sent to me? If _Treasure Island_ is at all like it, it will be
delightful. I was just the other day wondering at my folly in not
remembering it, when I was writing _T. I._, as a mine for pirate tips.
_T. I._ came out of Kingsley's _At Last_, where I got the Dead Man's
Chest--and that was the seed--and out of the great Captain Johnson's
_History of Notorious Pirates_. The scenery is Californian in part, and
in part _chic_.

I was downstairs to-day! So now I am a made man--till the next time.

R. L. STEVENSON.

If it was _Captain Singleton_, send it to me, won't you?

_Later._--My life dwindles into a kind of valley of the shadow picnic. I
cannot read; so much of the time (as to-day) I must not speak above my
breath, that to play patience, or to see my wife play it, is become the
be-all and the end-all of my dim career. To add to my gaiety, I may
write letters, but there are few to answer. Patience and Poesy are thus
my rod and staff; with these I not unpleasantly support my days.

I am very dim, dumb, dowie, and damnable. I hate to be silenced; and if
to talk by signs is my forte (as I contend), to understand them cannot
be my wife's. Do not think me unhappy; I have not been so for years; but
I am blurred, inhabit the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim
designs upon activity. All is at a standstill; books closed, paper put
aside, the voice, the eternal voice of R. L. S., well silenced. Hence
this plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very great
purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy, dull, somnolent,
superannuated son of a bedpost.

TO W. E. HENLEY

I suppose, but cannot remember, that I had in the meantime sent him
_Captain Singleton_.

[_Hotel Ch