MY DEAR GOSSE,—I enclose the receipt and the corrections. As for your letter and Gilder’s, I must take an hour or so to think; the matter much importing—to me. The £40 was a heavenly thing. I send the MS. by Henley, because he acts for me in all matters, and had the thing, like all my other books, in his detention. He is my unpaid agent—an admirable arrangement for me, and one that has rather more than doubled my income on the spot. If I have been long silent, think how long you were so and blush, sir, blush. I was rendered unwell by the arrival of your cheque, and, like Pepys, ‘my hand still shakes to write of it.’ To this grateful emotion, and not to D.T., please attribute the raggedness of my hand. This year I should be able to live and keep my family on my own earnings, and that in spite of eight months and more of perfect idleness at the end of last and beginning of this. It is a sweet thought. This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, ‘I dwell already the next door to Heaven!’ If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my fig-marigolds, and my olives, and my view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, as severe as Zeus, you would not think the phrase exaggerated. It is blowing to-day a _hot_ mistral, which is the devil or a near connection of his. This to catch the post.—Yours affectionately, R. L. STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE _La Solitude_, _Hyères-les-Palmiers_, _Var_, _France_, _May_ 21, 1883. MY DEAR GOSSE,—The night giveth advice, generally bad advice; but I have taken it. And I have written direct to Gilder to tell him to keep the book {269} back and go on with it in November at his leisure. I do not know if this will come in time; if it doesn’t, of course things will go on in the way proposed. The £40, or, as I prefer to put it, the 1000 francs, has been such a piercing sun-ray as my whole grey life is gilt withal. On the back of it I can endure. If these good days of _Longman_ and the _Century_ only last, it will be a very green world, this that we dwell in and that philosophers miscall. I have no taste for that philosophy; give me large sums paid on the receipt of the MS. and copyright reserved, and what do I care about the non-bëent? Only I know it can’t last. The devil always has an imp or two in every house, and my imps are getting lively. The good lady, the dear, kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady, Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis! But catch her! I must now go to bed; for I have had a whoreson influenza cold, and have to lie down all day, and get up only to meals and the delights, June delights, of business correspondence.