potion--and change horribly
into Jekyll.

He set to work at once, and in three feverish days completed the first
draft of his parable. In this the Hyde aspect was only Jekyll's
unassuming disguise, adopted at hours when he wished to be a little gay.
Stevenson burned his first draft, and rewrote the whole in three days.

He knew, it seems, that the magical powder was an error. One sees how
the thing could be managed otherwise, with a slight strain on the
resources of psychical research. But in no way could the story have
attained "the probable impossible," which Aristotle preferred to "the
improbable possible."

Stevenson sent the manuscript to my friend Mr. Charles Longman, who, in
turn, sent it to me. I began to read it one night, in the security of a
modest London drawing-room, and, naturally, it fascinated me from the
first page. Then I came to a certain page, which produced such an
emotion that I threw the manuscript on a chair, and scuttled
apprehensively to the safety of bed. Later, a kinsman, who seldom read a
book, told me that, living alone in a great Highland house, he had
thrown down the printed book at the same passage, and made the same
inglorious retreat. Anyone who knows the book, knows what the passage
is.

The story was produced in a paper-covered volume costing a shilling, and
was little heeded till a reviewer in _The Times_ "caught this great
stupid public by the ear," as Thackeray said.

The clergy of all denominations did the rest. As they had preached on
"Pamela," a hundred and forty years earlier, so they called the
attention of their flocks to Hyde and to Jekyll. "Who are Hyde and
Jekyll, my brethren? _You_ are Hyde and Jekyll. _I_ am Jekyll and Hyde;
each of us is Jekyll, and, alas, _each of us is Hyde_!"

Stevenson had long ago "found himself"; now he was found by the public.
The names of his two rascally heroes (Dr. Jekyll is even less of a
gentleman than Hyde) became proverbial.

The gruesome parable occupied an interval in the making of what I
suppose is his masterpiece--"Kidnapped." The story centres on the Appin
Murder of 1751, about which he had made inquiries in the neighbourhood
of Rannoch, where Alan Breck skulked after the shooting of Campbell of
Glenure in the hanging wood south of Ballachulish. Stevenson could not
learn who "the other man" was--the real murderer in the romance. I know,
but respect the Celtic secret. The fatal gun was found, very many years
after the deed,