Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a positive engagement.  I had chosen besides a very easy style.  Compare it with the almost contemporary ‘Merry Men’, one reader may prefer the one style, one the other—­’tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain.  It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight.  But alas! this was not my case.  Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold.  My mouth was empty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the ‘Hand and Spear’!  Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do.  I was thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged a failure:  was this to be another and last fiasco?  I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M. de Boisgobey.  Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale; and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a day, I finished Treasure Island.  It had to be transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds (to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me askance.  He was at that time very eager I should write on the characters of Theophrastus:  so far out may be the judgments of the wisest men.  But Symonds (to be sure) was scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy’s story.  He was large-minded; ‘a full man,’ if there was one; but the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style.  Well! he was not far wrong.

Treasure Island—­it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first title, The Sea Cook—­appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention.  I did not care.  I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning:  it was my kind of picturesque.  I was not a little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.  What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale, and