now without an almanack.  With an almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders.  With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in The Antiquary.  With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of Rob Roy.  And it is certainly well, though far from necessary, to avoid such ‘croppers.’  But it is my contention—­my superstition, if you like--that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident.  The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words.  Better if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone.  But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.

THE GENESIS OF ‘THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE’

I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac.  It was winter; the night was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests.  From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders:  a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation.  For the making of a story here were fine conditions.  I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship.  ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, ’let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.’  I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by.  I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction.  In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.