DEAR SIR,--_The Great North Road_ is still unfinished; it is scarce I should say beyond Highgate: but it will be finished some day, bar the big accident. It will not however gratify your taste; the highwayman is not grasped: what you would have liked (and I, believe me) would have been _Jerry Abershaw_: but Jerry was not written at the fit moment; I have outgrown the taste--and his romantic horse-shoes clatter faintlier down the incline towards Lethe.--Truly yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO KATHARINE DE MATTOS _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Summer 1885._ MY DEAR CATHERINE,--'Tis the most complete blague and folly to write to you; you never answer and, even when you do, your letters crackle under the teeth like ashes; containing nothing as they do but unseasonable japes and a great cloudy vagueness as of the realm of chaos. In this I know well they are like mine; and it becomes me well to write such--but not you--for reasons too obvious to mention. We have both been sick; but to-day I am up, though with an aching back. But I hope all will be better. Of your views, state, finances, etc. etc., I know nothing. We were mighty near the end of all things financially, when a strange shape of a hand giving appeared in Heaven or from Hell, and set us up again for the moment; yet still we totter on a whoreson brink. I beg pardon. I forgot I was writing to a lady; but the word shall stay: it is the only word; I would say it to the Q----n of E----d. How do you like letters of this kind? It is your kind. They mean nothing; they are blankly insignificant; and impudently put one in the wrong. One has learnt nothing; and forsooth one must reply.--Yours, the Inexpressive Correspondent, R. L. S. Hey-ey-ey! Sold again. Hey-ey-ey! Postscript: sold again. TO W. H. LOW In August of this year Stevenson made with his wife an excursion to the west country (stopping at Dorchester on the way, for the pleasure of seeing Mr. Thomas Hardy at home), and was detained for several weeks at The New London inn, Exeter, by a bad fit of hemorrhage. His correspondence is not resumed until the autumn. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 22, 1885._