he or I, I believe, would call one;
'tis the attacks on my morality (which I had thought a gem of the first
water) I referred to.

Now, my dear James, come--come--come. The spirit (that is me) says,
Come; and the bride (and that is my wife) says, Come; and the best thing
you can do for us and yourself and your work is to get up and do so
right away.--Yours affectionately,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO WILLIAM ARCHER

_[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] October 30, 1885._

DEAR MR. ARCHER,--It is possible my father may be soon down with me; he
is an old man and in bad health and spirits; and I could neither leave
him alone, nor could we talk freely before him. If he should be here
when you offer your visit, you will understand if I have to say no, and
put you off.

I quite understand your not caring to refer to things of private
knowledge. What still puzzles me is how you ("in the witness box"--ha! I
like the phrase) should have made your argument actually hinge on a
contention which the facts answered.

I am pleased to hear of the correctness of my guess. It is then as I
supposed; you are of the school of the generous and not the sullen
pessimists; and I can feel with you. I used myself to rage when I saw
sick folk going by in their Bath-chairs; since I have been sick myself
(and always when I was sick myself), I found life, even in its rough
places, to have a property of easiness. That which we suffer ourselves
has no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and wanton cruelty
that suffering wears when we see it in the case of others. So we begin
gradually to see that things are not black, but have their strange
compensations; and when they draw towards their worst, the idea of death
is like a bed to lie on. I should bear false witness if I did not
declare life happy. And your wonderful statement that happiness tends to
die out and misery to continue, which was what put me on the track of
your frame of mind, is diagnostic of the happy man raging over the
misery of others; it could never be written by the man who had tried
what unhappiness was like. And at any rate, it was a slip of the pen:
the ugliest word that science has to declare is a reserved indifference
to happiness and misery in the individual; it declares no leaning toward
the black, no iniquity on the large scale in fate's doings, rather a
marble equality, dread not cruel, giving and taking away and
reconciling.

Why have I not written m