Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/257

 large and generally disastrous experience of printers and printers readers. Nowhere do I send worse copy than to Young Folks for with this sort of story I rarely rewrite; yet nowhere am I so well used. And the skill with which the somewhat arbitrary and certainly baffling dialect was picked up, in this case of the 'Black Arrow,' filled me with a gentle surprise.

"I will add that you have humiliated me: that you should have been so much more wide awake than myself is both humiliating and—I say it very humbly—perhaps flattering.

"The reader is a kind of veiled prophet between the author and the public—a veiled, anonymous intermediary: and it pleases me to greet and thank him.—Your obliged servant,

"(alias Captn. George North)."

Mr. Dow adds: "Months afterwards, when travelling by short stages from Edinburgh to Bournemouth, he stopped in London to see me, and unheeding Mr. Henderson's entreaties not to attempt to mount the flights of stairs necessary (he was exceedingly ill), said 'I will ascend the stairs and see the reader, though I die for it!' But he was so exhausted by the effort that when he entered the reading-closet he was speechless."

The fourth of the Cassell Stevensons, "The Master of Ballantrae," was published in August, 1889, having begun to appear serially in Scribner's Magazine in November, 1888. It was begun at Saranac, in the last months of 1887, was taken across the American Continent to San Francisco, and was finished at Honolulu. Stevenson always referred to it as "my favourite." "Catriona," the last complete romance Stevenson wrote, was published in September, 1893, after having run in serial form as "David Balfour: Memoirs of his Adventures at Home and Abroad." It was written at Vailima amid fierce distractions, for the Samoans were seething with civil war, and constantly appealing to Tusitala for counsel and help. As Mrs. Stevenson says: "His every action misconstrued and resented by the white inhabitants of the island, the excitement and fatigue of my husband's daily life might