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
pedestrian inspiration; 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