.

"A sailor would get back at me by saying 'Perhaps she
didn't carry skysails.'

"I would reply, 'Suppose the mainsail was as soft as silk
and the hawser as pliable, would you, as a sailor, throw
them away on dead men?'

"A mistaken idea exists that Stevenson wrote the Billy
Bones song and only used one verse in "Treasure Island." He
'quotes' the only verse there is. We of the sea locate the
scene of the verse at Dead Chest Island, half way between
the S. W. & S. E. points of Porto Rico, four and one-half
miles off shore, which was used as a buccaneer rendezvous,
and later as the haven of wreckers and smugglers. It was
first named by the Spanish 'Casa de Muertos'--the Coffin.

"While I knew that Stevenson wrote, I did not know him as a
writer. I knew him as the grandson and son of men who dared
to do, and who achieved in the doing. I also knew him as a
man interested in everything pertaining to the sea.

"In fancy, I can see him gazing off to leeward, and hear
him drone--as of yore--

"'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest.'"

My personal interest in "Derelict" from its earliest stages has led me to
discuss it with many people, some of them A. B.'s, and this is the first
criticism I have ever heard of the technic of the words used to convey the
picture. I do not mean to say that Bramleykite Filling's points are not
well taken, technically, but I do say that qualified sailors, with literary
judgment, have been carried over these delinquencies of technic, if that
expresses it, by the very vividness but simplicity of the picture, which
could not be so were there a false note in either sentiment or portrayal.
Thus for this purpose a mainsail is a piece of jute bagging, if you please,
or ordinary canvas, and a hawser is a flexible rope.

When _The Scoop_ reached my hand with its entertaining and not unjust
criticism, I besought Allison for a few lines of comment to add to my
collection of "Derelict" treasures. In the same old characteristic way
(same old black pencil; same old spongy copy paper) he wrote me the
following note with which this volume closes:

Oct. 26, 1914.
Dear Hitch:

Bramleykite Pilling's comments on "Derelict," from the standpoint
of scientific criticism, seem to me to be