If you do not answer this in four pages, I shall stop the enclosed fiver at the bank, a step which will lead to your incarceration for life. As my visits to Arcady are somewhat uncertain, you had better address 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, as usual. I shall walk over for the note if I am not yet home.—Believe me, very really yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I charge extra for a flourish when it is successful; this isn’t, so you have it gratis. Is there any news in Babylon the Great? My fellow-creatures are electing school boards here in the midst of the ages. It is very composed of them. I can’t think why they do it. Nor why I have written a real letter. If you write a real letter back, damme, I’ll try to _correspond_ with you. A thing unknown in this age. It is a consequence of the decay of faith; we cannot believe that the fellow will be at the pains to read us. TO W. E. HENLEY 17 _Heriot Row_, _Edinburgh_ [_April_ 1879]. MY DEAR HENLEY,—Heavens! have I done the like? ‘Clarify and strain,’ indeed? ‘Make it like Marvell,’ no less. I’ll tell you what—you may go to the devil; that’s what I think. ‘Be eloquent’ is another of your pregnant suggestions. I cannot sufficiently thank you for that one. Portrait of a person about to be eloquent at the request of a literary friend. You seem to forget sir, that rhyme is rhyme, sir, and—go to the devil. I’ll try to improve it, but I shan’t be able to—O go to the devil. Seriously, you’re a cool hand. And then you have the brass to ask me _why_ ‘my steps went one by one’? Why? Powers of man! to rhyme with sun, to be sure. Why else could it be? And you yourself have been a poet! G-r-r-r-r-r! I’ll never be a poet any more. Men are so d–d ungrateful and captious, I declare I could weep. O Henley, in my hours of ease You may say anything you please, But when I join the Muse’s revel, Begad, I wish you at the devil! In vain my verse I plane and bevel, Like Banville’s rhyming devotees; In vain by many an artful swivel Lug in my meaning by degrees; I’m sure to hear my Henley cavil; And grovelling prostrate on my knees, Devote his body to the seas, His correspondence to the devil! Impromptu poem. I’m going to Shandon Hydropathic _cum parentibus_. Write here. I heard from Lang. Ferrier prayeth to be remembered; he means to write, likes his Tourgenieff greatly. Also likes my ‘What was on the Slate,’ which, under a new title, yet unfound, and with a new and, on the whole, kindly _dénouement_, is going to shoot up and become a star. . . .