er goes about six hours on
him.

R. L. S.

TO MRS. SITWELL

During his days in London Stevenson had gone with Mrs. Sitwell to
revisit the Elgin marbles, and had carried off photographs of them to
put up in his room at Edinburgh. _King Matthias's Hunting Horn_ has
perished like so many other stories of this time.

_[Edinburgh, November 1874], Tuesday._

Well, I've got some women now, and they're better than nothing. Three,
without heads, who have been away getting framed. And you know they are
more to me, after a fashion, than they can be to you, because, after a
fashion also, they are women. I have come now to think the sitting
figure in spite of its beautiful drapery rather a blemish, rather an
interruption to the sentiment. The two others are better than one has
ever dreamed; I think these two women are the only things in the world
that have been better than, in Bible phrase, it had entered into my
heart to conceive. Who made them? Was it Pheidias? or do they not know?
It is wonderful what company they are--noble company. And then I have
now three Japanese pictures that are after my own heart, and I get up
from time to time and turn a bit of favourite colour over and over, roll
it under my tongue, savour it till it gets all through me; and then back
to my chair and to work.

This afternoon about six there was a small orange moon, lost in a great
world of blue evening. A few leafless boughs, and a bit of garden
railing, criss-cross its face; and below it there was blueness and the
spread lights of Leith, lost in blue haze. To the east, the town, also
subdued to the same blue, piled itself up, with here and there a lit
window, until it could print off its outline against a faint patch of
green and russet that remained behind the sunset.

I must tell you about my way of life, which is regular to a degree.
Breakfast 8.30; during breakfast and my smoke afterwards till ten, when
I begin work, I read Reformation; from ten, I work until about a quarter
to one; from one until two, I lunch and read a book on Schopenhauer or
one on Positivism; two to three work, three to six anything; if I am in
before six, I read about Japan: six, dinner and a pipe with my father
and coffee until 7.30; 7.30 to 9.30, work; after that either supper and
a pipe at home, or out to Simpson's or Baxter's: bed between eleven and
twelve.

_Wednesday._--Two good things have arrived to me to-day: your letter for
on