until Easter, it will certainly not be later. Therefore perpend,
and do not get caught out. Of course, if you can do pictures, it will be
a great pleasure to me to see our names joined; and more than that, a
great advantage, as I dare say you may be able to make a bargain for
some share a little less spectral than the common for the poor author.
But this is all as you shall choose; I give you _carte blanche_ to do or
not to do.--Yours most sincerely,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

O, Sargent has been and painted my portrait; a very nice fellow he is,
and is supposed to have done well; it is a poetical but very
chicken-boned figure-head, as thus represented.

R. L. S. Go on.

_P.P.S._--Your picture came; and let me thank you for it very much. I am
so hunted I had near forgotten. I find it very graceful; and I mean to
have it framed.

TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON

_Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth [first week of
November 1884]._

MY DEAR SIMPSON,--At last, after divers adventures here we are: not
Pommery and Greno as you see, "but jist plain auld Bonellie, no very
faur frae Jenniper Green," as I might say if I were writing to Charles.
I hope now to receive a good bundle from you ere long; and I will try to
be both prompt and practical in response. I hope to hear your boy is
better: ah, that's where it bites, I know, that is where the childless
man rejoices; although, to confess fully, my whole philosophy of life
renounces these renunciations; I am persuaded we gain nothing in the
least comparable to what we lose, by holding back the hand from any
province of life; the intrigue, the imbroglio, such as it is, was made
for the plunger and not for the teetotaller. And anyway I hope your news
is good.

I have nearly finished Lawson's most lively pamphlet. It is very clear
and interesting. For myself, I am in our house--a home of our own, in a
most lovely situation, among forest trees, where I hope you will come
and see us and find me in a repaired and more comfortable
condition--greatly pleased with it--rather hard-up, verging on the
dead-broke--and full tilt at hammering up some New Arabians for the pot.

I wonder what you do without regular habits of work. I am capable of
only two theories of existence: the industrious worker's, the
spreester's; all between seems blank to me. We grow too old, and I, at
least, am too much deteriorated, for the last; and the first becomes a
b