it; and you must just try to take this dedication in
place of a great many things that I might have said, and that I ought to
have done, to prove that I am not altogether unconscious of the great
debt of gratitude I owe you. This little book, which is all about my
childhood, should indeed go to no other person but you, who did so much
to make that childhood happy.

Do you know, we came very near sending for you this winter. If we had
not had news that you were ill too, I almost believe we should have done
so, we were so much in trouble.

I am now very well; but my wife has had a very, very bad spell, through
overwork and anxiety, when I was _lost_! I suppose you heard of that.
She sends you her love, and hopes you will write to her, though she no
more than I deserves it. She would add a word herself, but she is too
played out.--I am, ever your old boy,

R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

Stevenson was by this time beginning to send home some of the MS. of
the _Child's Garden_, the title of which had not yet been settled.
The pieces as first numbered are in a different order from that
afterwards adopted, but the reader will easily identify the
references.

[_Nice, March 1883._]

MY DEAR LAD,--This is to announce to you the MS. of Nursery Verses, now
numbering XLVIII. pieces or 599 verses, which, of course, one might
augment _ad infinitum_.

But here is my notion to make all clear.

I do not want a big ugly quarto; my soul sickens at the look of a
quarto. I want a refined octavo, not large--not _larger_ than the Donkey
book, at any price.

I think the full page might hold four verses of four lines, that is to
say, counting their blanks at two, of twenty-two lines in height. The
first page of each number would only hold two verses or ten lines, the
title being low down. At this rate, we should have seventy-eight or
eighty pages of letterpress.

The designs should not be in the text, but facing the poem; so that if
the artist liked, he might give two pages of design to every poem that
turned the leaf, _i.e._ longer than eight lines, _i.e._ to twenty-eight
out of the forty-six. I should say he would not use this privilege (?)
above five times, and some he might scorn to illustrate at all, so we
may say fifty drawings. I shall come to the drawings next.

But now you see my book of the thickness, since the drawings count two
pages, of 180 pages; and since the paper will perhaps be thick