to A. Conan Doyle

Vailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894.

MY DEAR CONAN DOYLE,—If you found anything to entertain you in my Treasure Island article, it may amuse you to know that you owe it entirely to yourself.  Your ‘First Book’ was by some accident read aloud one night in my Baronial ’All.  I was consumedly amused by it, so was the whole family, and we proceeded to hunt up back Idlers and read the whole series.  It is a rattling good series, even people whom you would not expect came in quite the proper tone—Miss Braddon, for instance, who was really one of the best where all are good—or all but one! . . .  In short, I fell in love with ‘The First Book’ series, and determined that it should be all our first books, and that I could not hold back where the white plume of Conan Doyle waved gallantly in the front.  I hope they will republish them, though it’s a grievous thought to me that that effigy in the German cap—likewise the other effigy of the noisome old man with the long hair, telling indelicate stories to a couple of deformed negresses in a rancid shanty full of wreckage—should be perpetuated.  I may seem to speak in pleasantry—it is only a seeming—that German cap, sir, would be found, when I come to die, imprinted on my heart.  Enough—my heart is too full.  Adieu.—Yours very truly,

Robert Louis Stevenson
(in a German cap, damn ’em!)