or certain) came up to my
standard.

And now enough said; it were hard if a poor man could not criticise
another without having so much ink shed against him. But I shall still
regret you should have written on an hypothesis you knew to be
untenable, and that you should thus have made your paper, for those who
do not know me, essentially unfair. The rich, fox-hunting squire speaks
with one voice; the sick man of letters with another.--Yours very truly,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(_Prometheus-Heine in minimis_).

_P.S._--Here I go again. To me, the medicine bottles on my chimney and
the blood on my handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view
of life, as you would know, I think, if you had experience of sickness;
they do not exist in my prospect; I would as soon drag them under the
eyes of my readers as I would mention a pimple I might chance to have
(saving your presence) on my posteriors. What does it prove? what does
it change? it has not hurt, it has not changed me in any essential part;
and I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the
world to these unimportant privacies.

But, again, there is this mountain-range between us--_that you do not
believe me_. It is not flattering, but the fault is probably in my
literary art.

TO W. H. LOW

The "other thing coming out" mentioned below in the last paragraph
but one was _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, December 26, 1885._

MY DEAR LOW,--_Lamia_ has not yet turned up, but your letter came to me
this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was
irresistible. The sand of Lavenue's crumbled under my heel; and the
bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when
I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you that fetish
still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, too, my first sight of
you in a frock-coat and a smoking-cap, when we passed the evening at the
Cafe de Medicis; and my last when we sat and talked in the Parc Monceau;
and all these things made me feel a little young again, which, to one
who has been mostly in bed for a month, was a vivifying change.

Yes, you are lucky to have a bag that holds you comfortably. Mine is a
strange contrivance; I don't die, damme, and I can't get along on both
feet to save my soul; I am a chronic sickist; and my work cripples along
between bed and the parlour, between the me