human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of
life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to
us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite
new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a
reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has
the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims
upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will
never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my
part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are
vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is
only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the
fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the
mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on
unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what
he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some
hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that
when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be
weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and
when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they
come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his
secret is kept as if he had not written.

A STEVENSON LETTER

_Dear Madam_:--It is impossible to be more gracefully penitent: I give you
leave to buy ----'s triple piracy in ---- the library; and this permission
is withheld from all other living creatures, so that you alone will
possess that publication without sin.

I am, dear madam,
Yours truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
March, 1887.

A JUSTIFICATION

Boston, June 5, 1900.--When Mr. Stevenson was at Saranac in the
Adirondacks I sent him a short editorial on his Brownies that I had
written for the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, and also a letter, saying that
I owed him one dollar. I professed penitence for having bought a pirated
copy of "Dr. Jekyll" for 25 cents, and promised to make good the deficit
if I ever met him. He sent me the letter above.

In May, eleven years later, Miss Louise Imogene Guiney invited me to meet
her