outside of my experience, and I
desire all my friends to forgive me my sins of omission this while
back. I only wish you were the only one to whom I owe a letter, or many
letters.

But you see, at least, you had done nothing to offend me; and I dare say
you will let me have a note from time to time, until we shall have
another chance to meet.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

An excellent new year to you, and many of them.

If you chance to see a paragraph in the papers describing my illness,
and the "delicacies suitable to my invalid condition" cooked in copper,
and the other ridiculous and revolting yarns, pray regard it as a
spectral illusion, and pass by.

[MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

I intercalate here Mrs. Stevenson's extremely vivid and
characteristic account of the weird misadventures that befell the
pair during their retreat from St. Marcel in search of a healthier
home.

[_Campagne Defli, St. Marcel, January 1883._]

MY DEAR MR. SYMONDS,--What must you think of us? I hardly dare write to
you. What do you do when people to whom you have been the dearest of
friends requite you by acting like fiends? I do hope you heap coals of
fire on their heads in the good old Christian sense.

Louis has been very ill again. I hasten to say that he is now better.
But I thought at one time he would never be better again. He had
continual hemorrhages and became so weak that he was twice insensible in
one day, and was for a long time like one dead. At the worst fever broke
out in this village, typhus, I think, and all day the death-bells rang,
and we could hear the chanting whilst the wretched villagers carried
about their dead lying bare to the sun on their coffin-lids, so
spreading the contagion through the streets. The evening of the day when
Louis was so long insensible the weather changed, becoming very clear
and fine and greatly refreshing and reviving him. Then I said if it held
good he should start in the morning for Nice and try what a change might
do. Just at that time there was not money enough for the two of us, so
he had to start alone, though I expected soon to be able to follow him.
During the night a peasant-man died in a house in our garden, and in the
morning the corpse, hideously swollen in the stomach, was lying on its
coffin-lid at our gates. Fortunately it was taken away just before Louis
went, and he didn't see it nor hear anything about it unt