without an almanack. With an almanack, and the map of the
country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted

on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind,
a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest 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 almanack 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, as may be read at length in the inimitable

novel of ROB ROY. And it is certainly well, though far from
necessary, to avoid such 'croppers.' But it is my contention

- my superstition, 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 he has 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, short-cuts and footprints for his messengers;
and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in

TREASURE ISLAND, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.
CHAPTER VI - THE GENESIS OF 'THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE'

I WAS walking one night in the verandah of a small house in
which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter;

the night was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and
cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way

below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and
boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among

the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of
isolation. For the making of a story here were fine

conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of
emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal

of THE PHANTOM SHIP. 'Come,' said I to my engine, 'let us
make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea

and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall
have the same large features, and may be treated in the same

summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and
admiring.' I was here brought up with a reflection

exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I
failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than

Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a
familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his

readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my
brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief

to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the
course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a

singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had
been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead,

Inspector-General John Balfour.
On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer

below zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next
moment I had seen the circumstance transplanted from India

and the tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the
stringent cold of the Canadian border. Here then, almost

before I had begun my story, I had two countries, two of the
ends of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of

the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general
acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability,

it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and
this decided me to consider further of its possibilities.

The man who should thus be buried was the first question: a
good man, whose return to life would be hailed by the reader

and the other characters with gladness? This trenched upon
the Christian picture, and was dismissed. If the idea, then,

was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of
evil genius to his friends and family, take him through many

disappearances, and make this final restoration from the pit
of death, in the icy American wilderness, the last and the

grimmest of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the
craft that I was now in the most interesting moment of an

author's life; the hours that followed that night upon the
balcony, and the following nights and days, whether walking

abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of
unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me

alone, perhaps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my
wife, who is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I

must spur her up at all seasons to hear me relate and try to
clarify my unformed fancies.

And while I was groping for the fable and the character
required, behold I found them lying ready and nine years old

in my memory. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease
porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there ever a more

complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here, thinking
of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution, or

perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the
Curtain or final Tableau of a story conceived long before on

the moors between Pitlochry and Strathardle, conceived in
Highland rain, in the blend of the smell of heather and bog-

plants, and with a mind full of the Athole correspondence and
the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far

away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual
tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer.

My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and
America being all obligatory scenes. But of these India was

strange to me except in books; I had never known any living
Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club in London, equally

civilised, and (to all seeing) equallyaccidental with
myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get

into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy
lightness; and I believe this first suggested to me the idea

of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at first
intended that he should be Scottish, and I was then filled

with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my
own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me

it would be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince's
Irishmen; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular

reason to find himself in India with his countryman, the
unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided he should be,

and then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow
across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord

Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep
with my Master: in the original idea of this story conceived

in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to be
worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant)

he was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very
bad Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was

I to evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering
his services; he gave me excellent references; he proved that

he was highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own