to Mrs. Sitwell

Swanston, Wednesday, [Autumn] 1874.

I have been hard at work all yesterday, and besides had to write a long letter to Bob, so I found no time until quite late, and then was sleepy.  Last night it blew a fearful gale; I was kept awake about a couple of hours, and could not get to sleep for the horror of the wind’s noise; the whole house shook; and, mind you, our house is a house, a great castle of jointed stone that would weigh up a street of English houses; so that when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something.  But the quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering silent pauses when the storm’s heart stands dreadfully still for a moment.  O how I hate a storm at night!  They have been a great influence in my life, I am sure; for I can remember them so far back—long before I was six at least, for we left the house in which I remember listening to them times without number when I was six.  And in those days the storm had for me a perfect impersonation, as durable and unvarying as any heathen deity.  I always heard it, as a horseman riding past with his cloak about his head, and somehow always carried away, and riding past again, and being baffled yet once more, ad infinitum, all night long.  I think I wanted him to get past, but I am not sure; I know only that I had some interest either for or against in the matter; and I used to lie and hold my breath, not quite frightened, but in a state of miserable exaltation.

My first John Knox is in proof, and my second is on the anvil.  It is very good of me so to do; for I want so much to get to my real tour and my sham tour, the real tour first: it is always working in my head, and if I can only turn on the right sort of style at the right moment, I am not much afraid of it.  One thing bothers me; what with hammering at this J. K., and writing necessary letters, and taking necessary exercise (that even not enough, the weather is so repulsive to me, cold and windy), I find I have no time for reading except times of fatigue, when I wish merely to relax myself.  O—and I read over again for this purpose Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine; it struck me a good deal at first, but this second time it has fetched me immensely.  I am but just done with it, so you will know the large proportion of salt to take with my present statement, that it’s the finest thing I ever read!  Of course, it isn’t that, it’s full of longueurs, and is not quite ‘redd up,’ as we say in Scotland, not quite articulated; but there are splendid things in it.

I say, do take your maccaroni with oil: do, please.  It’s beastly with butter.—Ever your faithful friend,

Robert Louis Stevenson.