to Sidney Colvin

Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, Jan. 4, 1885.

DEAR S. C.,—I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the Iron Duke.  Conceive my glee: I have refused the £100, and am to get some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead.  ’Tis for Longman’s English Worthies, edited by A. Lang.  Aw haw, haw!

Now, look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a dream?  I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages on the fly.  If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand copy, or who would?  The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better.  If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter; I shall catch.  I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Maréchal), Marmont’s Memoirs, Grevillè’s Memoirs, Peel’s Memoirs, Napier, that blind man’s history of England you once lent me, Hamley’s Waterloo; can you get me any of these?  Thiers, idle Thiers also.  Can you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge campaign?  How are you?  A Good New Year to you.  I mean to have a good one, but on whose funds I cannot fancy: not mine leastways, as I am a mere derelict and drift beam-on to bankruptcy.

For God’s sake, remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket.—Yours ever,

R. L. Stevenson.