We had come up to Dunfermline with a coaching party.  When walking through England in the year 1867 with George Lauder and Harry Phipps I had formed the idea of coaching from Brighton to Inverness with a party of my dearest friends.  The time had come for the long-promised trip, and in the spring of 1881 we sailed from New York, a party of eleven, to enjoy one of the happiest excursions of my life.  It was one of the holidays from business that kept me young and happy—­worth all the medicine in the world.

All the notes I made of the coaching trip were a few lines a day in twopenny pass-books bought before we started.  As with “Round the World,” I thought that I might some day write a magazine article, or give some account of my excursion for those who accompanied me; but one wintry day I decided that it was scarcely worth while to go down to the New York office, three miles distant, and the question was how I should occupy the spare time.  I thought of the coaching trip, and decided to write a few lines just to see how I should get on.  The narrative flowed freely, and before the day was over I had written between three and four thousand words.  I took up the pleasing task every stormy day when it was unnecessary for me to visit the office, and in exactly twenty sittings I had finished a book.  I handed the notes to Scribner’s people and asked them to print a few hundred copies for private circulation.  The volume pleased my friends, as “Round the World” had done.  Mr. Champlin one day told me that Mr. Scribner had read the book and would like very much to publish it for general circulation upon his own account, subject to a royalty.

The vain author is easily persuaded that what he has done is meritorious, and I consented. [Every year this still nets me a small sum in royalties.  And thirty years have gone by, 1912.] The letters I received upon the publication[37] of it were so numerous and some so gushing that my people saved them and they are now bound together in scrapbook form, to which additions are made from time to time.  The number of invalids who have been pleased to write me, stating that the book had brightened their lives, has been gratifying.  Its reception in Britain was cordial; the “Spectator” gave it a favorable review.  But any merit that the book has comes, I am sure, from the total absence of effort on my part to make an impression.  I wrote for my friends; and what one does easily, one does well.  I reveled in the writing of the book, as I had in the journey itself.

[Footnote 37:  Published privately in 1882 under the title Our Coaching Trip, Brighton to Inverness.  Published by the Scribners in 1883 under the title of An American Four-in-Hand in Britain.]

The year 1886 ended in deep gloom for me.  My life as a happy careless young man, with every want looked after, was over.  I was left alone in the world.  My mother and brother passed away in November, within a few days of each other, while I lay in bed under a severe attack of typhoid fever, unable to move and, perhaps fortunately, unable to feel the full weight of the catastrophe, being myself face to face with death.