to James Payn

Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886.

DEAR JAMES PAYN,—Your very kind letter came very welcome; and still more welcome the news that you see —’s tale.  I will now tell you (and it was very good and very wise of me not to tell it before) that he is one of the most unlucky men I know, having put all his money into a pharmacy at Hyères, when the cholera (certainly not his fault) swept away his customers in a body.  Thus you can imagine the pleasure I have to announce to him a spark of hope, for he sits to-day in his pharmacy, doing nothing and taking nothing, and watching his debts inexorably mount up.

To pass to other matters: your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter remains for me undecipherable.  I call her, then, your daughter—and a very good name too—and I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house.  The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on each side.  Now the true house is the one before the hospital: is that No. 11?  If not, what do you complain of?  If it is, how can I help what is true?  Everything in the Dynamiter is not true; but the story of the Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I lay my hand on my heart and swear to it.  It took place in that house in 1884; and if your daughter was in that house at the time, all I can say is she must have kept very bad society.

But I see you coming.  Perhaps your daughter’s house has not a balcony at the back?  I cannot answer for that; I only know that side of Queen Square from the pavement and the back windows of Brunswick Row.  Thence I saw plenty of balconies (terraces rather); and if there is none to the particular house in question, it must have been so arranged to spite me.

I now come to the conclusion of this matter.  I address three questions to your daughter:—

1st.   Has her house the proper terrace?

2nd.  Is it on the proper side of the hospital?

3rd.  Was she there in the summer of 1884?

You see, I begin to fear that Mrs. Desborough may have deceived me on some trifling points, for she is not a lady of peddling exactitude.  If this should prove to be so, I will give your daughter a proper certificate, and her house property will return to its original value.

Can man say more?—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

I saw the other day that the Eternal had plagiarised from Lost Sir Massingberd: good again, sir!  I wish he would plagiarise the death of Zero.