tes my women--admits a great
part of my Countess to be on the spot.

Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for
once. Really, L100 is a sight more than _Treasure Island_ is worth.

The reason of my _deche_? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert
it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will
be in a _deche_ too. I am not in a _deche_, however; _distingue_--I
would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but _not solvent_. At a
touch the edifice, _aedificium_, might collapse. If my creditors began to
babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the
crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil,
_oleum_, for the dam axles. But I've paid my rent until September; and
beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener,
Lloyd's teacher, and the great chief creditor Death, I can snap my
fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make
'em charge me at the moment; they won't, the money goes, the debt
remains.--The Required Play is in the _Merry Men_.

Q. E. F.

I thus render honour to your _flair_; it came on me of a clap; I do not
see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it's there: passion,
romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a
sea-pink in sea-froth! _S'agit de la desenterrer._ "Help!" cries a
buried masterpiece.

Once I see my way to the year's end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I
grind at letters; finish _Otto_; write, say, a couple of my _Traveller's
Tales_; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in
earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I'm morally sure there
is a play in _Otto_, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the
story.

As a story, a comedy, I think _Otto_ very well constructed; the echoes
are very good, all the sentiments change round, and the points of view
are continually, and, I think (if you please), happily contrasted. None
of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling.

R. L. S.

TO W. E. HENLEY

The verses alluded to are some of those afterwards collected in
_Underwoods_.

[_Chalet la Solitude, Hyeres, May or June 1883._]

DEAR HENLEY,--You may be surprised to hear that I am now a great writer
of verses; that is, however, so. I have the mania now like my betters,
and faith, if I live till I am forty, I shall have a book of rhymes like
Pollock, Gosse, or