Pray write me something cheery. A little Edinburgh gossip, in Heaven's name. Ah! what would I not give to steal this evening with you through the big, echoing, college archway, and away south under the street lamps, and away to dear Brash's, now defunct! But the old time is dead also, never, never to revive. It was a sad time too, but so gay and so hopeful, and we had such sport with all our low spirits and all our distresses, that it looks like a kind of lamplit fairyland behind me. O for ten Edinburgh minutes--sixpence between us, and the ever-glorious Lothian Road, or dear mysterious Leith Walk! But here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling; here in this strange place, whose very strangeness would have been heaven to him then; and aspires, yes, C. B., with tears, after the past. See what comes of being left alone. Do you remember Brash? the sheet of glass that we followed along George Street? Granton? the night at Bonny mainhead? the compass near the sign of the _Twinkling Eye_? the night I lay on the pavement in misery? I swear it by the eternal sky Johnson--nor--Thomson ne'er shall die! Yet I fancy they are dead too; dead like Brash. R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON The next is after going down to meet his wife and stepson, when the former had left the doctor's hands at Berne. _Chalet Buol, Davos-Platz, December 26, 1881._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--Yesterday, Sunday and Christmas, we finished this eventful journey by a drive in an _open_ sleigh--none others were to be had--seven hours on end through whole forests of Christmas trees. The cold was beyond belief. I have often suffered less at a dentist's. It was a clear, sunny day, but the sun even at noon falls, at this season, only here and there into the Prättigau. I kept up as long as I could in an imitation of a street singer:-- "Away, ye gay landscapes, ye gardens of roses," etc. At last Lloyd remarked, a blue mouth speaking from a corpse-coloured face, "You seem to be the only one with any courage left?" And, do you know, with that word my courage disappeared, and I made the rest of the stage in the same dumb wretchedness as the others. My only terror was lest Fanny should ask for brandy, or laudanum, or something. So awful was the idea of putting my hands out, that I half thought I would refuse. Well, none of us are a penny the worse, Lloyd's cold better; I, with a twinge of the rheumatiz; and Fanny better than her ordinary. General conclusion between Lloyd and me as to the journey: A prolonged visit to the dentist's, complicated with the fear of death. Never, O never, do you get me there again.--Ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE Mr. Gosse and R. L. S. had proposed to Mr. R. W. Gilder, of the Century Magazine, that they should collaborate for him on a series of murder papers, beginning with the Elstree murder; and he had accepted the proposal on terms which they thought liberal.