nce 'Treasure Island.' I am 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 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 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