ple moving there, and the real stars
and moon overhead, instead of the tin imitations that preside over
London. I do not think my wife very well; but I am in hopes she will now
have a little rest. It has been a hard business, above all for her; we
lived four months in the hurricane season in a miserable house,
overborne with work, ill-fed, continually worried, drowned in perpetual
rain, beaten upon by wind, so that we must sit in the dark in the
evenings; and then I ran away, and she had a month of it alone. Things
go better now; the back of the work is broken; and we are still foolish
enough to look forward to a little peace. I am a very different person
from the prisoner of Skerryvore. The other day I was three-and-twenty
hours in an open boat; it made me pretty ill; but fancy its not killing
me half-way! It is like a fairy story that I should have recovered
liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men,
boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest.
I can wish you nothing more delightful than my fortune in life; I wish
it you; and better, if the thing be possible.

Lloyd is tinkling below me on the typewriter; my wife has just left the
room; she asks me to say she would have written had she been well
enough, and hopes to do it still.--Accept the best wishes of your
admirer,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

This letter announces (1) the arrival of Mrs. Thomas Stevenson from
Sydney, to take up her abode in her son's island home now that the
conditions of life there had been made fairly comfortable; and (2)
the receipt of a letter from me expressing the disappointment felt by
Stevenson's friends at home at the impersonal and even tedious
character of some portions of the South Sea Letters that had reached
us. As a corrective of this opinion, I may perhaps mention here that
there is a certain many-voyaged master-mariner as well as
master-writer--no less a person than Mr. Joseph Conrad--who does not
at all share it, and prefers _In the South Seas_ to _Treasure
Island_.

_[Vailima] April 29th, '91._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I begin again. I was awake this morning about half-past
four. It was still night, but I made my fire, which is always a
delightful employment, and read Lockhart's _Scott_ until the day began
to peep. It was a beautiful and sober dawn, a dove-coloured dawn,
insensibly brightening to gold. I was l