_Friday._--I am awfully out of the humour to write; I am very inert although quite happy; I am informed by those who are more expert that I am bilious. _Bien_; let it be so; I am still content; and though I can do no original work, I get forward making notes for my Knox at a good trot. _Saturday._--I am so happy. I am no longer here in Edinburgh. I have been all yesterday evening and this forenoon in Italy, four hundred years ago, with one Sannazzaro, a sculptor, painter, poet, etc., and one Ippolita, a beautiful Duchess. O I like it badly! I wish you could hear it at once; or rather I wish you could see it immediately in beautiful type on such a page as it ought to be, in my first little volume of stories. What a change this is from collecting dull notes for _John Knox_, as I have been all the early part of the week--the difference between life and death.--I am quite well again and in such happy spirits, as who would not be, having spent so much of his time at that convent on the hills with these sweet people. _Vous verrez_, and if you don't like this story--well, I give it up if you don't like it. Not but what there's a long way to travel yet; I am no farther than the threshold; I have only set the men, and the game has still to be played, and a lot of dim notions must become definite and shapely, and a deal be clear to me that is anything but clear as yet. The story shall be called, I think, _When the Devil was well_, in allusion to the old proverb. Good-bye. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh [January 1875]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have worked too hard; I have given myself one day of rest, and that was not enough; so I am giving myself another. I shall go to bed again likewise so soon as this is done, and slumber most potently. 9 P.M.--Slept all afternoon like a lamb. About my coming south, I think the still small unanswerable voice of coins will make it impossible until the session is over (end of March); but for all that, I think I shall hold out jolly. I do not want you to come and bother yourself; indeed, it is still not quite certain whether my father will be quite fit for you, although I have now no fear of that really. Now don't take up this wrongly; I wish you could come; and I do not know anything that would make me happier, but I see that it is wrong to expect it, and so I resign myself: some time after. I offered Appleton a series of papers on the modern French school--the Parnassiens, I think they call them--de Banville, Coppée, Soulary, and Sully Prudhomme. But he has not deigned to answer my letter.