rmed at the time by
Stevenson's devoted admirer, Mr. McClure, that the book was completed by
Mr. Osbourne for the Press. Then Stevenson took up the manuscript, and,
as Mr. Osbourne says, "forced the thing to live as it had never lived
before." Indeed, the style of "The Wrong Box" throughout, is Louis's
style in such romantic farces as "The New Arabian Nights," a manner of
his own creation.

I seem to remember that I saw the finished manuscript, or perhaps an
early copy of the book, and I did not care for it. Mr. Kipling rather
surprised me by finding it so very amusing. Mr. Osbourne says that the
story "still retains (it seems to me) a sense of failure," and that the
public does not relish it. For my own part, on later re-readings, the
little farce has made me laugh hysterically at the sorrows of Mr.
William Pitman, that mild drawing-master, caught up and whirled away
into adventures worthy of the great Fortune du Boisgobey. The scene in
which he is described as the American Broadwood, a person inured to a
simple patriarchal life, a being of violent passions; with the immortal
John in the character of the Great Vance; and that joy for ever, Uncle
Joseph, with his deathless thirst for popular information and
instruction--these personages, this "educated insolence," never cease to
amuse. Uncle Joseph is no caricature. But the world likes its
sensational novels to be written with becoming seriousness; in short,
"The Wrong Box" is aimed at a small but devoted circle of admirers.

People constantly ask men who have collaborated how they do the
business? As a rule, so some French collaborator says, "some one is the
dupe, and he is the man of genius." This was not true, too notably, in
the case of Alexandre Dumas, nor was it true in Stevenson's case. As a
rule, one man does the work, and the other looks on, but, again, this
was not the way in which Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne worked. They first
talked over the book together, and ideas were struck out in the
encounter of minds. This practice may, very probably, prove unfruitful,
or even injurious, to many writers; they are confused rather than
assisted. After or during the course of the conversations (when he had
an ally), after reflection, when he had not, Stevenson used to write out
a series of chapter headings. One, I remember, was "The Master of
Ballantrae to the Rescue," an incident in a tale which he began about
the obscure adventures of Prince Charles in 1749-1750. "Ball