_Rideau Cramoisi_! and _L’Ensorcelée_! and _Le Chevalier Des Touches_! This is degenerating into mere twaddle. So please remember us all most kindly to Mrs. Low, and believe me ever yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._—Were all your privateers voiceless in the war of 1812? Did _no one_ of them write memoirs? I shall have to do my privateer from chic, if you can’t help me. {320} My application to Scribner has been quite in vain. See if you can get hold of some historic sharp in the club, and tap him; they must some of them have written memoirs or notes of some sort; perhaps still unprinted; if that be so, get them copied for me. R. L. S. TO H. B. BAILDON _Vailima_, _January_ 30_th_, 1894. MY DEAR BAILDON,—‘Call not blessed.’—Yes, if I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce; and parties to shy bricks at me; and now it begins to look as if I should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten. It’s a pity suicide is not thought the ticket in the best circles. But your letter goes on to congratulate me on having done the one thing I am a little sorry for; a little—not much—for my father himself lived to think that I had been wiser than he. But the cream of the jest is that I have lived to change my mind; and think that he was wiser than I. Had I been an engineer, and literature my amusement, it would have been better perhaps. I pulled it off, of course, I won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts; but how long will it last? I don’t know, say the Bells of Old Bow. All of which goes to show that nobody is quite sane in judging himself. Truly, had I given way and gone in for engineering, I should be dead by now. Well, the gods know best. . . . I hope you got my letter about the _Rescue_.—Adieu, R. L. S. True for you about the benefit: except by kisses, jests, song, _et hoc genus omne_, man _cannot_ convey benefit to another. The universal benefactor has been there before him. TO J. H. BATES _Vailima_, _Samoa_, _March_ 25_th_, 1894.