to Mrs. Sitwell

Edinburgh, Tuesday [February 1875].

I got your nice long gossiping letter to-day—I mean by that that there was more news in it than usual—and so, of course, I am pretty jolly.  I am in the house, however, with such a beastly cold in the head.  Our east winds begin already to be very cold.

O, I have such a longing for children of my own; and yet I do not think I could bear it if I had one.  I fancy I must feel more like a woman than like a man about that.  I sometimes hate the children I see on the street—you know what I mean by hate—wish they were somewhere else, and not there to mock me; and sometimes, again, I don’t know how to go by them for the love of them, especially the very wee ones.

Thursday.—I have been still in the house since I wrote, and I have worked.  I finished the Italian story; not well, but as well as I can just now; I must go all over it again, some time soon, when I feel in the humour to better and perfect it.  And now I have taken up an old story, begun years ago; and I have now re-written all I had written of it then, and mean to finish it.  What I have lost and gained is odd.  As far as regards simple writing, of course, I am in another world now; but in some things, though more clumsy, I seem to have been freer and more plucky: this is a lesson I have taken to heart.  I have got a jolly new name for my old story.  I am going to call it A Country Dance; the two heroes keep changing places, you know; and the chapter where the most of this changing goes on is to be called ‘Up the middle, down the middle.’  It will be in six, or (perhaps) seven chapters.  I have never worked harder in my life than these last four days.  If I can only keep it up.

Saturday.—Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more.  It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a King’s palace, or the great King’s palace of the blue air.  He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there.  I shall try to be of use to him.

We have had two beautiful spring days, mild as milk, windy withal, and the sun hot.  I dreamed last night I was walking by moonlight round the place where the scene of my story is laid; it was all so quiet and sweet, and the blackbirds were singing as if it was day; it made my heart very cool and happy.—Ever yours,

Robert Louis Stevenson.