done so, and the thing gone on 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 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
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 further. I chanced to pick up the "Tales