ed: that is, if deportation would suit your view: the ship was
actually sought to be hired. Yes, it would have been an advertisement,
and rather a lark, and yet a blooming nuisance. For my part, I shall try
to do without.

No one has thought fit to send me Atalanta[55]; and I have no proof at
all of _D. Balfour_, which is far more serious. How about the _D. B._
map? As soon as there is a proof it were well I should see it to accord
the text thereto--or t'other way about if needs must. Remember I had to
go much on memory in writing that work. Did you observe the dedication?
and how did you like it? If it don't suit you, I am to try my hand
again.--Yours ever,

R. L. S.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Editors and publishers (since those days we have been _deniaises_
with a vengeance) had actually been inclined to shy at the terms of
the fraudulent marriage contract, which is the pivot of the whole
story; see below, p. 187.

[33] For a lively account of this plantation and its history, see
Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_, chap. i.

[34] The native wife of a carpenter in Apia.

[35] The sequel to _Kidnapped_, published in the following year under
the title _Catriona_.

[36] Most of the work on the plantations in Samoa is done by "black
boys," _i.e._ imported labourers from other (Melanesian) islands.

[37] By Howard Pyle.

[38] In answer to the obvious remark that the length and style of
_The Wrecker_, then running in Scribner's Magazine, were out of
keeping with what professed at the outset to be a spoken yarn.

[39] Of Ballantrae: the story is the unfinished _Young Chevalier_.

[40] Afterwards changed into _The Ebb Tide_.

[41] Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty_, a shade misquoted.

[42] "Kava, properly Ava, is a drink more or less intoxicating, made
from the root of the _Piper Methysticum_, a Pepper plant. The root
is grated: formerly it was chewed by fair damsels. The root thus
broken up is rubbed about in a great pail, with water slowly added.
A strainer of bark cloth is plunged into it at times, and wrung out
so as to carry away the small fragments of root. The drink is made
and used in ceremony. Every detail is regulated by rules, and the
manner of the mixture of the water, the straining, the handling of
the cup, the drinking out of it and returning, should all be done
according to a well-established manner and in certain