ld believe in the
immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but
we were put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire:
the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps
well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly
day by day; and they are enough for a man who knows his own frailty and
sees all things in the proportion of reality. The soul of piety was
killed long ago by that idea of reward. Nor is happiness, whether
eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind seeks. Happinesses are but
his wayside campings; his soul is in the journey; he was born for the
struggle, and only tastes his life in effort and on the condition that
he is opposed. How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious,
so made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy
passions--how can he be rewarded but by rest? I would not say it aloud;
for man's cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he
continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior
happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and taste it; he
can be about the rugged and bitter business where his heart lies; and
yet he can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and
enjoy the notion that he is both himself and something else; and that
his friends will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and still
be lovable,--as if love did not live in the faults of the beloved only,
and draw its breath in an unbroken round of forgiveness! But the truth
is, we must fight until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet
for mankind but complete resumption into--what?--God, let us say--when
all these desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last.

Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short--_excusez_.

R. L. S.

TO JAMES PAYN

The late Mrs. Buckle, a daughter of Mr. James Payn married to the
editor of the Times, had laughingly remonstrated, through her father,
on recognising some features of her own house in Queen Square,
Bloomsbury, in the description of that tenanted by the fair Cuban in
the section of Stevenson's _Dynamiter_ which tells the story of the
Brown Box.

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886._

DEAR JAMES PAYN,--Your very kind letter came very welcome; and still
more welcome the news that you see ----'s tale. I will now tell you (and
it was very good and very wise of me