ing months of
March-December 1883, and the semi-convalescence of February-May 1884,
was a prolific one in the way of correspondence; and there is perhaps no
period of his life when his letters reflect so fully the variety of his
moods and the eagerness of his occupations.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE

At Marseilles, while waiting to occupy the house which he had leased
in the suburbs of that city, Stevenson learned that his old friend
and kind adviser, Mr. James Payn, with whom he had been intimate as
sub-editor of the Cornhill Magazine under Mr. Leslie Stephen in the
'70's, had been inadvertently represented in the columns of the New
York Tribune as a plagiarist of R. L. S. In order to put matters
right, he at once sent the following letter both to the Tribune and
to the London Athenaeum:--

_Terminus Hotel, Marseilles, October 16, 1882._

SIR,--It has come to my ears that you have lent the authority of your
columns to an error.

More than half in pleasantry--and I now think the pleasantry
ill-judged--I complained in a note to my _New Arabian Nights_ that some
one, who shall remain nameless for me, had borrowed the idea of a story
from one of mine. As if I had not borrowed the ideas of the half of my
own! As if any one who had written a story ill had a right to complain
of any other who should have written it better! I am indeed thoroughly
ashamed of the note, and of the principle which it implies.

But it is no mere abstract penitence which leads me to beg a corner of
your paper--it is the desire to defend the honour of a man of letters
equally known in America and England, of a man who could afford to lend
to me and yet be none the poorer; and who, if he would so far
condescend, has my free permission to borrow from me all that he can
find worth borrowing.

Indeed, sir, I am doubly surprised at your correspondent's error. That
James Payn should have borrowed from me is already a strange conception.
The author of _Lost Sir Massingberd_ and _By Proxy_ may be trusted to
invent his own stories. The author of _A Grape from a Thorn_ knows
enough, in his own right, of the humorous and pathetic sides of human
nature.

But what is far more monstrous--what argues total ignorance of the man
in question--is the idea that James Payn could ever have transgressed
the limits of professional propriety. I may tell his thousands of
readers on your side of the Atlantic that there