to J. M. Barrie

Vailima, Samoa, February 1892.

DEAR MR. BARRIE,—This is at least the third letter I have written you, but my correspondence has a bad habit of not getting so far as the post.  That which I possess of manhood turns pale before the business of the address and envelope.  But I hope to be more fortunate with this: for, besides the usual and often recurrent desire to thank you for your work-you are one of four that have come to the front since I was watching and had a corner of my own to watch, and there is no reason, unless it be in these mysterious tides that ebb and flow, and make and mar and murder the works of poor scribblers, why you should not do work of the best order.  The tides have borne away my sentence, of which I was weary at any rate, and between authors I may allow myself so much freedom as to leave it pending.  We are both Scots besides, and I suspect both rather Scotty Scots; my own Scotchness tends to intermittency, but is at times erisypelitous—if that be rightly spelt.  Lastly, I have gathered we had both made our stages in the metropolis of the winds: our Virgil’s ‘grey metropolis,’ and I count that a lasting bond.  No place so brands a man.

Finally, I feel it a sort of duty to you to report progress.  This may be an error, but I believed I detected your hand in an article—it may be an illusion, it may have been by one of those industrious insects who catch up and reproduce the handling of each emergent man—but I’ll still hope it was yours—and hope it may please you to hear that the continuation of Kidnapped is under way.  I have not yet got to Alan, so I do not know if he is still alive, but David seems to have a kick or two in his shanks.  I was pleased to see how the Anglo-Saxon theory fell into the trap: I gave my Lowlander a Gaelic name, and even commented on the fact in the text; yet almost all critics recognised in Alan and David a Saxon and a Celt.  I know not about England; in Scotland at least, where Gaelic was spoken in Fife little over the century ago, and in Galloway not much earlier, I deny that there exists such a thing as a pure Saxon, and I think it more than questionable if there be such a thing as a pure Celt.

But what have you to do with this? and what have I?  Let us continue to inscribe our little bits of tales, and let the heathen rage!  Yours, with sincere interest in your career,

Robert Louis Stevenson.