 CHAPTER XXI OF MY FIRST BOOK MY FIRST BOOK BY VARIOUS UNDER TONES AND IDLES AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN BY ROBERT BUCHANAN My first series effort in literature was what I may call a double-barrowed one. In other words, I was seriously engaged upon two books at the same time, and it was by the merriest accident that they did not appear simultaneously. As it was, only a few months divided one from the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or thymese twins. The book of poems called undertones was the one. The book of poems called Idles and Legends of Inverburn was the other. They were published nearly thirty years ago when I was still a boy, and as they happened to bring me into connection more or less intimately with some of the leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may be of interest. A word first as to my literary beginnings. I can scarcely remember the time when the idea of winning fame as an author had not occurred to me, and so I determined very early to adopt the literary profession, a determination which I unfortunately carried out to my own lifelong discomfort and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public. When a boy in Glasgow I made the acquaintance of David Gray, who was fired with a similar ambition to fly incontinently to London, the terrible city whose neglect is death, to smile is fame, and to take it by storm, it seemed so easy. Westminster Abbey wrote my friend to a correspondent, if I live I shall be buried there, so help me God. I mean after Tennyson's death I myself wrote to Philip Hamilton to be poet laureate. From these samples of our callous speech the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise. Through some blunder of arrangement we too started for London on the same day, but from different railway stations, and until some weeks afterwards one knew nothing of the other's exodus. I arrived at King's Cross railway station with a conventional half-crown in my pocket, literally an absolutely half-crown. I wandered about the great city till I was weary, fell in with a thief and Good Samaritan who sheltered me, starved and struggled with abundant happiness, and finally found myself located at 66 Stamford Street, Waterloo Bridge, in a top room, for which I paid, when I had the money, seven shillings a week. Finally I lived royally with due comfrey for many a day, and hither once at morning I brought my poor friend Gray, whom I had discovered languishing somewhere in the borough, and who was already death-struck through sleeping out one night in Hyde Park. West Minister Abbey, if I live I shall be buried there. Poor country singing-bird, the great dismal cage of the dead was not for him, thank God. He lies under the open heaven, close to the little river which he immortalized in song. After a brief sojourn in the dear old ghastly bankrupt garret at number 66 he fluttered home to die. To that old garret in these days came living men of letters who were of large and important interest to us poor cheepers from the north, Richard Moncton Milms, Lawrence Oliphant, Sidney Doble, among others, who took a kindly interest in my dying comrade. But afterwards, when I was left to fight the battle alone, the place was solitary. Ever reserved and independent, not to say dour unopinionated, I made no friends and cared for none. I had found a little work on the newspapers and magazines, just enough to keep body and soul alive, and while occupied with this I was busy on the literary twins to which I referred at the opening of this paper. What did my isolation matter when I had all the gods of Greece for company to say nothing of the face and trolls of Scottish fairyland? Pallas and Aphrodite haunted that old garret. Out on Waterloo Bridge night after night I saw Celine and all her nymphs, and when my heart sank low, the fairies of Scotland sang me lullabies. It was a happy time. Sometimes for a fortnight together I never had a dinner, safe, perhaps on Sunday, when a good-natured heave would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord's joint. My favourite place of refreshment was the Caledonian coffee-house in Covent Garden. Here for a few coppers I could feast on coffee and muffins, muffins saturated with butter and worthy of the gods. Then issuing forth full-fed, glowing, oleaginous I would light my pipe and wander out into the lighted streets. Criticisms for the Athenaeum, then edited by Hephorst Dixon, brought me a tenon six pence a column. I used to go to the old office in Wellington Street and have my contributions measured off on the current number with the foot-rule by good old John Francis the publisher. I wrote, too, for the literary gassette where the pay was less princely, seven and six pence a column, I think, but with all extras deducted. The gassette was then edited by John Morley, who came to the office daily with a big dog. I well remember the time when you, a boy, came to me, a boy, in Catherine Street, wrote honest John to me years afterwards. But the neighbourhood of Covent Garden had greater wonders. Two or three times a week, walking black bag in hand, from chairing cross-station to the office of all the year round in Wellington Street, came the good, the only Dickens. From that good genie, the poor straggler from Fereyland, got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight. The gospel of plum pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia. At this time I was, save the mark, terribly in earnest, with a dogged determination to bow down to no grave and literary idol, but to judgment of all ranks on their personal merits. I never had much reverence for gods of any sort. If the superior persons could not win me by love, I remained heretical. So it was a long time before I came close to any living soul, and all that time I was working away at my poems. A little later I used to go a Sundays to the open house of Westland Marston, which was then a great haunt of literary Bohemians. Here I met first Dina Molok, the author of John Halifax, who took a great fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on Hampstead Heath and lend me all her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sidney Dobel a strangely beautiful soul with, what seemed to me then, very effeminate manners. Dobel's mouth was ever full of very pretty latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the thing described in doggerel lines. On the stairs the young missus's ran to have a look at Miss Kate's young man. The sibilance in the first line he thought admirably suggested the idea of the young lady slipping along the banisters and peeping into the hall. But I had other friends, more helpful to me, in preparing my first twin offering to the muses, the faces under the gas, the painted women on the bridge, how many a night have I walked up and down by their sides and talked to them for hours together, the actors in the theatres, the ragged groups at the stage doors. London to me then was still fairyland. Even in the hay market, with its babbles of nymph and sadder, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn, deep sympathy with which told me that I was a born pagan and could never be really comfortable in any modern temple of the proprieties. On other points connected with that old life on the borders of Bohemia I need not touch. It has all been so well done already by merger in the Vide Boheme, and it will not bear translation into contemporary English. There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the mouth too. But ego fui in Bohemia. There were inky fellows and bouncing girls then. Now there are only fine ladies and respectable God-fearing men of letters. It was while the twins were fashioning that I went down in summer time to live at Chertsey of the Thames, chiefly in order to be near to one I had long admired, Thomas Love Peacock, the friend of Shelley, and the author of Hedlong Hall, Greaky Peaky, as they called him, on account of his prodigious knowledge of things and books Hellenic. I soon grew to love the dear old man and sat at his feet like an obedient pupil in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower Halliford. To him I first read some of my undertones, getting many a rap over the knuckles for my sacrilegious tempering with divine myths. What mercy could I expect from one who had never forgiven Johnny Keats for his frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene, and who was horrified at the base modernisms of Shelley's Prometheus unbound? But to think of it, he had known Shelley and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all. Dear old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. When shortly before he died his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly refused to listen and cried roundly in a line of vehement blank verse, by the immortal gods I will not stir, under such auspices and with all the ardour of youth to help my book or books progressed. Meantime I was breaking out into poetry in the magazines and writing criticism by the yard. At last the time came when I remembered another friend with whom I had corresponded, and whose advice I thought I might now ask with some confidence. This was George Henry Lewis, to whom, when I was a boy in Glasgow, I had sent a bundle of manuscript with a blunt question, Am I or Am I not a poet? To my delight he had replied to me with a qualified affirmative, saying that in the productions he had discerned a real faculty and perhaps a future poet. I say perhaps, he added, because I do not know your age, and because there are so many poetical blossoms which never come to fruit. He had furthermore advised me to write as much as I felt impelled to write, but to publish nothing, at any rate for a couple of years. Three years had passed, and I had neither published anything, that is to say in a book form, nor had I had any further communication with my kind correspondent. To Lewis then I wrote, reminding him of our correspondence, telling him that I had waited not two years but three, and that I now felt inclined to face the public. I soon received an answer, the result of which was that I went, on Lewis's invitation, to the Priory North Bank, Regent's Park, and met my friend and his partner, better known as George Elliot. But as the novelists say, I am anticipating. Sick to death David Gray had returned to the cottage of his father, the handloom weaver at Kirk and Tillock, and there had peacefully passed away, leaving as his legacy to the world the volume of beautiful poems published under the auspices of Lord Houghton. I knew of his death the hour he died, awaking in the night. I was certain of my loss, and spoke of it, long before the formal news reached me, to a friend. This by the way, but what is more to the purpose, is that my first grief for a beloved comrade had expressed itself in the words which were to form the poem on my first book. Poet gentle-hearted, are you then departed, and have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of all so well? As the deeply cherished aspiration perished, and are you happy, David, in that heaven where you dwell? Have you found the secret we so wildly sought for, and is your soul in swathed at last in the singing robes you fought for? Full of my dead friend I spoke of him to Lewis and George Elliot, telling them the piteous story of his life and death. Both were deeply touched, and Lewis cried, Tell that story to the public, which I did immediately afterwards, in the Cornell magazine. By this time I had my twins ready, and had discovered a publisher for one of them, undertones. The other, Idols and Legends of Inverburn, was a ruggeder bandling, containing almost the first blank verse poems ever written in Scottish dialect. I selected one of the poems, Willie Baird, and showed it to Lewis. He expressed himself delighted, and asked for more. I then showed him the two babes. Better and better, he wrote, publish a volume of such poems, and your position is assured. More than this he at once found me a publisher, Mr. George Smith, of Mr. Smith and Elder, who offered me a good round sum, such it seemed to me then, for the copyright. Eventually, however, after Billy Baird had been published in the Cornell, I withdrew the manuscript from Mr. Smith and Elder, and transferred it to Mr. Alexander Strahan, who offered me both more liberal terms, and more enthusiastic appreciation. It was just after the appearance of my story of David Gray in the Cornell that I first met, at the Priory North Bank, with Robert Browning. It was an odd and representative gathering of men, only one lady being present, the hostess, George Eliot. I was never much of a hero worshipper, but I had long been a sympathetic Browningite, and I well remember George Eliot taking me aside after my first tiate with a poet and saying, Well, what do you think of him? Does he come up to your ideal? He didn't, quite, I must confess, but I afterwards learned to know him well and to understand him better. He was delighted with my statement that one of Gray's wild ideas was to rush over to Florence and throw himself on the sympathy of Robert Browning. Phantoms of these first books of mine, how they begin to rise around me. Phantoms of friends and counsellors that have flown for ever, the sibling Marian Evans with her long, weird, dreamy face, Lewis with his big, brow and keen, thoughtful eyes, Browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a skipper's, cocked up at the weather, Peacock with his round, mellifluous speech of the old Greeks, David Gray, gray-dyed and beautiful, like Shelly's ghost. Very hotten with his warm, worldly smile and easy-fitting enthusiasm. Where are they all now? Where are the roses of last summer, the snows of yesteryear? I passed by the priory to-day, and it looked like a great, lonely tomb. In those days the house where I live now was not built. All up here, hamsted ways, was grass and fields. It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Elliott used to walk on their way to hamsted heath. The symbol has gone, but the great philosopher still remains to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck to know him then, would it had been, but he is my friend and neighbour in these latter days, and thanks to him I still get glimpses of manners of the old gods. With the publication of my first two books I was fairly launched, I may say, on the stormy waters of literature. When the Athenium told its readers that this was poetry and of a noble kind, and when Lewis voted in the fortnightly review that even if I never wrote another line my place among the pastoral poets would be undisputed, I suppose I felt happy enough, far more happy than any praise could make me now. Poor little pygmy in a cockle-boat, I thought creation was ringing with my name. I think I must have seemed rather conceited and bounceable, for I have a vivid remembrance of a fortnightly dinner at the Starr and Garter Richmond, when Anthony Trollo, angry with me for expressing a doubt about the poetical greatness of Horace, wanted to fling a decanter at my head. It was about this time that an omniscient publisher, after an interview with me, exclaimed, The circumstance is historical. I don't like that young man. He talked to me as if he was God Almighty, or Lord Byron. But in sober truth I never had the sort of conceit with which men credited me. I merely lacked gullibility, and so at the first glance the whole unmistakable humbug, and insincerity of the literary life. I think still that, as a rule, the profession of letters narrows the sympathy, and warps the intelligence. When I saw the importance which a great man or woman could attach to a piece of perfunctory criticism, when I saw the care with which this eminent person humored his reputation, and the anxiety with which that eminent person concealed his true character, I found my young illusions very rapidly fading. On one occasion, when George Eliot was very much pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant individual who had thrust herself somewhat pertinaciously upon her, she turned to me and asked with a smile for my opinion. I gave it, rudely enough, to the effect that it was good for distinguished people to be reminded occasionally of how very small consequence they really were in the mighty life of the world. From that time until the present I have pursued the vocation into which fatal fortune during boyhood incontinently thrust me, and have subsisted ill sometimes, well sometimes, by a busy pen. I may therefore, with a certain experience, if with little authority, imitate those who have preceded me in given reminiscences of their first literary beginnings, and to offer a few words of advice to my younger brethren, to those persons I mean who are entering the profession of literature. To begin with, I entirely agree with Mr. Grant Allen in his recent avowal that literature is the poorest and least satisfactory of all professions. I will go even further and affirm that it is one of the least ennobling. With a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of my own period I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one individual who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions or be able to conceal such as he possesses, that he should have one eye on the market and the other on the public journals, that he should humbug himself into the delusion that bookwriting is the highest work in the universe, and that he should regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency. If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in society or in literature itself, he must be silent. Above all he must lay this solemn truth to heart that when the world speaks well of him the world will demand a price of praise and that price will possibly be his living soul. He may tinker, he may trim, he may succeed, he may be buried in Westminster Abbey, he may hear before he dies all the people saying, how good and great he is, how perfect is his art, how gloriously he embodies the tendencies of his time, but he will know all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living soul has gone to furnish that whitewashed sepulcher, a blameless reputation. For one other thing, also, the neophyte in literature had better be prepared. He will never be able to subsist by creative writing unless it so happens that the form of expression he chooses is popular in form, fiction, for example, and even in that case the work he does, if he is to live by it, must be in harmony with the social and artistic status quo. Revolt of any kind is always disagreeable. Three-fourths of the success of Lord Tennyson, to take an example, was due to the fact that this fine poet regarded life and all its phenomena from the standpoint of the English public school that he ethically and artistically embodied the sentiments of our excellent middle-class education. This great American contemporary, Whitman, in some respects the most commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples, and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary criticism. Another prosperous writer, to whom I have already alluded, George Elliott, enjoyed enormous popularity in her lifetime, while the most strenuous and passionate novelist of her period, Charles Reed, was entirely distanced by her in the immediate race for fame. In literature, as in all things, manners and custom, are most important. The hallmark of contemporary success is perfect respectability. It is not respectable to be too candid on any subject, religious, moral, or political. It is very respectable to say or imply that this country is the best of all possible countries, that war is a noble institution, that the Protestant religion is grandly liberal, and that social evils are only diversified forms of social good. Above all, to be respectable one must have beautiful ideas. Beautiful ideas are the very best stock in trade a young writer can begin with. These are indispensable to every complete literary outfit. Without them, the shortcut to Parnassus will never be discovered, even though one starts from rugby. CHAPTER 22 Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson He was far indeed from being my first book, far I am not a novelist alone, but I am well aware that my paymaster, the great public, regards what else I have written with indifference. If not a version, if it call upon me at all, it calls on me in the familiar and indeligible character, and when I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world by what is meant is my first novel. Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to ask why, when I was born with various manias, from my earliest childhood, of his mind to make a plaything of imaginary series of events, and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper makers. These upon reams must have gone into the making of Rathalot, the pendulum rising, but for doubt the past conformed dre, not a slim green pamphlet, with the imprint of Andrew Elliot for which, as I see with amazement from the book lists, the gentlemen of England are willing to pay fancy prices, but its predecessor, it will be historical romance without a spark of merit. And now deleted from the world. End of footnote. The kings pardon, otherwise park whitehead, Edward Davin, the country dance, and a vendetta in the west, and it is consolatory to remember that these reams are now all ashes, and have been received again into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated efforts. My such, indeed, as came to a fair bulk ere they were desisted from, and even so they cover a long vista of years. Rathalot was attempted before fifteen, the vendetta at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one. By that time I had written little books and little essays and short stories, and got patted on the back and paid for them, though not enough to live upon. I had quite a reputation. I was the successful man. I passed my days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make my cheek to burn. That I should spend a man's energy upon this business, and yet could not earn a livelihood, and still they're shown ahead of me an unattained ideal. So I had attempted the thing with vigor not less than ten or twelve times. I had not yet written a novel. All, all my pretty ones, had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years standing who should never have made a run. Everybody can write a short story, a bad one, I mean, who has industry and paper and time enough, but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain and write any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. The nature has certain rates, instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, forbids that any man cheered and supported by the consciousness no previous victory, should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in wheat. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running. He must be in one of those hours when the words come and the phrases balance for themselves, even to begin. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the book shall be accomplished. For so long a time the scientists to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same quality of style. For so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous. I remember I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel with the sort of veneration, as a feat, not a possibility of literature, but at least a physical and a moral endurance and the con- ridge of Ajax. In the faded year I came to live with my father and mother, et caneered, above Pitlotry. Then I walked on the red moors, and by the side of the golden burn, the rude pure error of our mountains inspired it, if it did not inspire us. And my wife and I projected a joint volume of logic stories, for which she wrote The Shadow on the Bed, and I turned out Fron Janet, and a first draft of The Merry Men. I love my native error, but it does not love me, and the end of this delightful period was a cold, a fly blister, and a migration by Strath Hirdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of Bremure. There it blew a good deal, and reigned in a proportion. My native error was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a house, lupuborealously known as the late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy in the late Miss McGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much and want of something craggy to break his mind upon. He had no thought of literature, it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages, and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of watercolors, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showmen, but I would sometimes invent a little, join the artist, so to speak, at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making colored drums. On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island. It was elaborately, and, I thought, beautifully colored, the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression, and contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets, and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island. I'm told there are people who do not care for maps and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of men, still distinctly traceable uphill and down dale, the mills, and the ruins, the ponds and the fairies, perhaps the standing stone or the geodic circle on the heath. Here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see, or two pens worth of imagination to understand with. No child but must remember Lang's head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest, and seeing it grow populace with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of Treasure Island, the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods, and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters. As they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection, the next thing I knew I had some papers before me, and I was writing on a list of chapters, how often have I done so, and the thing gone no further, but there seemed elements of success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys, no need of psychology or fine-writing, and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. Woman were excluded. I was unable to handle a break, which the Hispaniola should have been, but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame, and then I had an idea for John Silver, from which I promised myself finds of entertainment, to take an admired friend of mine, whom the reader very lately knows and admires as much as I do, to deprive him of all his finer qualities and hired graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but a strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent ingenuity, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw terrappellan. Such physical surgery is, I think, a common way of making character, perhaps is indeed the only way. We can put in the queen figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside, but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety and flexibility we know. But can we put him in? Upon the first we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong, from the second, knife in hand. We must cut away and deduct the needless, abhorrence of his nature. But the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of. On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire and the rain drumming on the window, began the sea-cook, for that was the original title. I have begun, and finished, a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency. It was not to be wondered at, for a stone waters are proviably sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robin Caruso. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these. They are trifles and details, and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner of talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from Masterman Ritty. It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying, departing, they had left behind them footprints on the sands of time, footprints which perhaps another, and I was the other. It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely carried further. I a chance to pick up the tales of a traveler. Some years ago, with a view to an anthology of Poe's narrative, and the book flew up and struck me. Billy Bones, his chest, the company and the parlor, the whole inner spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapters. All were there, all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it, then, as I sat writing by the fireside in what seemed the spring tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration. Not yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin. It seemed to belong to me like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, and found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once, with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside ends, robbers, old sailors, and accrucial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances. The lucky man did not require to. But on Treasure Island, he recognized something kindred to his own imagination. It was his kind of pittresque, and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When the time came for Billy Bowne's chest to be ransacked, I must have passed the better part of the day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory which I exactly followed. And the name of Flint's old ship, the Walrus, was given at its particular request. And now who should come dropping in? Ex machina. But Dr. Jep, in the disguised prince who is to be down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last act, re-carried in his pocket not a horn or a tailspin, but a publisher, had in fact been charged by my old friend Mr. Henderson. To, unearth, new writers for young folks. Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of the sea-cook. At the same time, we would by no means stop our readings, and accordingly the tail was begun again at the beginning, and so may be delivered for the benefit of Dr. Jep. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical faculty, for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his port-menetue. Here then was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a positive engagement. I chosen, besides, a very easy style, compared with the almost contemporary merry men. One reader may prefer the one style, one the other, to an affair of character, perhaps of mood, but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of ledgers might engage to turn out At so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight, but alas, this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters, and then, in the early paragraphs of my sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold, my mouth was empty. There was not one word of treasure island in my bosom, and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the hand and spear. Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking on the heath of waybridge and dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words, at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one, I was the head of a family, I had lost my health, I never yet paid my way, never yet made two hundred a year. My father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged a failure. Was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeed very close on despair, but I had shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the nozzles of M. D. Bosgoby. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale, and behold, it flowed from me like small talk, and in a second tie to the lighted industry. And again, at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished treasure island. I had to be transcribed almost exactly. My wife was ill, the schoolboy remained alone, the faithful, and John Addington Simons, to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on, looked on me, askance. He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus. So far out may be the judgements of the wisest men, but Simons, to be sure, was scared of the confidence to go out for sympathy on a boy's story. He was large-minded, a full man, if there was one, but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solsisms of style. Well, he was not far wrong. Treasure Island, it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title, The Seacook, particularly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked to tell myself for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning. It was my kind of picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver, also, and to this day rather admire this smooth and formidable adventure. It was infinitely more exhilarating. I had passed a landmark. I had finished a tale and written the end on my manuscript, as I had not done since the Pentland Rising, when I was a boy of sixteen not yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents. Had not Dr. Jeff come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular ease, it must have been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a surreptitious and unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought, or was the means of bringing, fire and food and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely say. I mean my own. But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite at an end. I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an inland skeleton island, not knowing what I meant, seeking all night for the immediate picturesque, and was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and Stole Flint's pointer, and in the same way it was because I had made two harbors that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel hands. The time came when it was decided to republish, and I sent in my manuscript and the map along with it to Messer's castle. The proofs came. They were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked, was told it had never been received, and said a guest. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine the whole book, make an inventory of all the illusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it, and the map was drawn again in my father's office, with embellishments, with blowing wells and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing. It elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint and the sailing directions of Billy Bones, but somehow it was never treasure island to me. I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. A few reminces of Poe de Faux and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, the name of the dead man's chest from Kingsley, at last, some recollections of canoeing on the high seas and the map itself, with its infinite eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is perhaps not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, it is always important. The author must know his countryside, with a real or imaginary, like his hand, the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behavior of the moon shall all be beyond cavill, and how troublesome the moon is. I have come to grieve over the moon in Prince Otto, and so soon as what was pointed out to me adopted a precaution which I recommend to other men. I never write, now, without an almanac. With an almanac, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house either actually plotted on paper or already immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the gross as possible blunders. With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in the antiquary. With the almanac at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen journeying on the most urgent affair to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night. Upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags to cover fifty in one day, have may be read at length in the intimate novel of Rob Roy, and is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such croppers. But it's my contention, my supervision, if you like, that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there. It grows in that soil. It has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country be real, and as he walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map, as he studies it. Relations will appear that he had not thought upon. He will discover obvious, though unsuspected shortcuts and footprints for his messengers, and when a map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a line of suggestion. End of Chapter 22 Red by Elijah Fisher End of my first book by Various