to W. Craibe Angus

Vailima, Samoa, November 1891.

MY DEAR MR. ANGUS,—Herewith the invaluable sheets.  They came months after your letter, and I trembled; but here they are, and I have scrawled my vile name on them, and ‘thocht shame’ as I did it.  I am expecting the sheets of your catalogue, so that I may attack the preface.  Please give me all the time you can.  The sooner the better; you might even send me early proofs as they are sent out, to give me more incubation.  I used to write as slow as judgment; now I write rather fast; but I am still ‘a slow study,’ and sit a long while silent on my eggs.  Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in—and there your stuff is, good or bad.  But the journalist’s method is the way to manufacture lies; it is will-worship—if you know the luminous quaker phrase; and the will is only to be brought in the field for study, and again for revision.  The essential part of work is not an act, it is a state.

I do not know why I write you this trash.

Many thanks for your handsome dedication.  I have not yet had time to do more than glance at Mrs. Begg; it looks interesting.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson.