of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’  I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.  The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with!  No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.  The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.  How often have I done so, and the thing gone no further!  But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise.  It was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone.  Women were excluded.  I was unable to handle a brig (which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame.  And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin.  Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.  We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him?  Our friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know—­but can we put him in?  Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea Cook, for that was the original title.  I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.  It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet.  I am now upon a painful chapter.  No doubt the