ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The Mutiny novel here foreshadowed never got written.

_[Saranac Lake] April 9th!! 1888._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have been long without writing to you, but am not to
blame. I had some little annoyances quite for a private eye, but they
ran me so hard that I could not write without lugging them in, which
(for several reasons) I did not choose to do. Fanny is off to San
Francisco, and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner's.
Where we shall go I know not, nor (I was going to say) care; so bald and
bad is my frame of mind. Do you know our--ahem!--fellow clubman, Colonel
Majendie? I had such an interesting letter from him. Did you see my
sermon? It has evoked the worst feeling: I fear people don't care for
the truth, or else I don't tell it. Suffer me to wander without purpose.
I have sent off twenty letters to-day, and begun and stuck at a
twenty-first, and taken a copy of one which was on business, and
corrected several galleys of proof, and sorted about a bushel of old
letters; so if any one has a right to be romantically stupid it is
I--and I am. Really deeply stupid, and at that stage when in old days I
used to pour out words without any meaning whatever and with my mind
taking no part in the performance. I suspect that is now the case. I am
reading with extraordinary pleasure the life of Lord Lawrence: Lloyd and
I have a mutiny novel--

(_Next morning, after twelve other letters_)--mutiny novel on hand--a
tremendous work--so we are all at Indian books. The idea of the novel is
Lloyd's: I call it a novel. 'Tis a tragic romance, of the most tragic
sort: I believe the end will be almost too much for human
endurance--when the hero is thrown to the ground with one of his own
(Sepoy) soldier's knees upon his chest, and the cries begin in the
Beebeeghar. O truly, you know it is a howler! The whole last part
is--well the difficulty is that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I
don't know who is to write it.

I still keep wonderful. I am a great performer before the Lord on the
penny whistle.--Dear sir, sincerely yours,

ANDREW JACKSON.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

_[Saranac Lake, April 1888.]
Address, c/o Messrs. Scribner's Sons,
743 Broadway, N.Y._

MY DEAR GAMEKEEPER,--Your p.c. (proving you a good student of Micawber)
has just arrived, and it paves the way to something I am anxious to say.
I wrote a paper the