if you please. My dear James, it is very spirited,
and very sound, and very noble too. Hudson, Mrs. Hudson, Rowland, O, all
first-rate: Rowland a very fine fellow; Hudson as good as he can stick
(did you know Hudson? I suspect you did), Mrs. H. his real born mother,
a thing rarely managed in fiction.

We are all keeping pretty fit and pretty hearty; but this letter is not
from me to you, it is from a reader of _R. H._ to the author of the
same, and it says nothing, and has nothing to say, but thank you.

We are going to re-read _Casamassima_ as a proper pendant. Sir, I think
these two are your best, and care not who knows it.

May I beg you, the next time _Roderick_ is printed off, to go over the
sheets of the last few chapters, and strike out "immense" and
"tremendous"? You have simply dropped them there like your
pocket-handkerchief; all you have to do is to pick them up and pouch
them, and your room--what do I say?--your cathedral!--will be swept and
garnished.--I am, dear sir, your delighted reader,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_P.S._--Perhaps it is a pang of causeless honesty, perhaps I hope it
will set a value on my praise of _Roderick_, perhaps it's a burst of the
diabolic, but I must break out with the news that I can't bear the
_Portrait of a Lady_. I read it all, and I wept too; but I can't stand
your having written it; and I beg you will write no more of the like.
_Infra_, sir; Below you: I can't help it--it may be your favourite work,
but in my eyes it's BELOW YOU to write and me to read. I thought
_Roderick_ was going to be another such at the beginning; and I cannot
describe my pleasure as I found it taking bones and blood, and looking
out at me with a moved and human countenance, whose lineaments are
written in my memory until my last of days.

R. L. S.

My wife begs your forgiveness; I believe for her silence.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

_Saranac Lake [December 1887]._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--This goes to say that we are all fit, and the place is
very bleak and wintry, and up to now has shown no such charms of climate
as Davos, but is a place where men eat and where the cattarh, catarrh
(cattarrh, or cattarrhh) appears to be unknown. I walk in my verandy in
the snaw, sir, looking down over one of those dabbled wintry landscapes
that are (to be frank) so chilly to the human bosom, and up at a grey,
English--nay, _mehercle_, Scottish--heaven; and I think it pretty bleak;
and the wind