triona." The scenes with the advocates of James of the Glens, at
Inveraray, read as if they had been recorded in shorthand, at the
moment. David himself is, of course, the Lowland prig he is meant to be,
but Catriona, at last, was a moving heroine, though Stevenson, justly,
preferred to her the beautiful Miss Grant, and entirely overcame the
difficulty of making us realise her beauty. The Princess, in "Prince
Otto," is a fair shadow, compared to Miss Grant, and Stevenson at last
convinced most readers that if he had omitted the interest of womanhood,
it was not from incompetence--though it may have been from diffidence.

At this time we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he
sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from
its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point
remarkable--a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make.
Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the
pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However,
it was the Luck of the island, and when it crossed the sea to Europe a
pestilence of measles fell on the native population. There was no
manifest connection of cause and effect.

Stevenson's letters to me were merely such notes as he might have
written had we both been living within the four-mile radius; usually
notes about books which he needed, always brightened with a quip and
some original application of slang. Occasionally there were rhymes. One
was about a lady:

"Who beckled, beckled, beckled gaily."

Another had the refrain:

"The dibs that take the islands
Are the dollars of Peru."

One long and lively piece was on the Achaean hero of a fantastic romance
by Mr. Rider Haggard and myself: the Ithacan, the Stormer of the City.
Stevenson exclaimed:

"Ye wily auld blackguard,
How far ye hae staggered,
Frae Homer to Haggard
And Lang."

How variously excellent he was as a letter-writer the readers of his
correspondence know, and how vast, considering his labours and his
health, that correspondence is! Often it is freakish, often it is
serious, but except in some epistles of the period of his
apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher
and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who,
criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an
insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a _po