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 man still distinctly traceable

up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and
the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE

on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for
any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to

understand with! No child but must remember laying his head
in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and

seeing it grow populous 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 was

writing out 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. Women were excluded. I was
unable to handle a brig (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 funds of
entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the

reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to
deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of

temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his
courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to

try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw
tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way

of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.
We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words

with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our
friend, with his infinitevariety 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 arborescence 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, I 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 is not to be

wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am
now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once

belonged to Robinson Crusoe. 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 in talking birds. The stockade, I

am told, is from MASTERMAN READY. 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 farther. I chanced to pick up the TALES OF A
TRAVELLER some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose

narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,
his chest, the company in the parlour, 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 pedestrianinspiration; nor 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, I 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 inns, robbers,

old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of
steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky

man did not require to! But in TREASURE ISLAND he recognised
something kindred to his own imagination; it was HIS kind of

picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily
chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When the

time came for Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must
have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back

of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I
exactly followed; and the name of 'Flint's old ship' - the

WALRUS - was given at his particular request. And now who
should come dropping in, EX MACHINA, but Dr. Japp, like the

disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace
and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket,

not a horn or a talisman, 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 extrememeasure 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 tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-
delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp. From that moment on,

I have thought highly of his criticalfaculty; for when he
left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and
now a positiveengagement. I had chosen besides a very easy

style. Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men',
one reader may prefer the one style, one the other - 'tis 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 letters might engage to turn out TREASURE

ISLAND 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 the 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 at

Weybridge in 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 had never

yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds 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 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 novels of M. de Boisgobey. 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 tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a