I thus render honour to your _flair_; it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it's there: passion, romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth! _S'agit de la desenterrer._ "Help!" cries a buried masterpiece. Once I see my way to the year's end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at letters; finish _Otto_; write, say, a couple of my _Traveller's Tales_; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I'm morally sure there is a play in _Otto_, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the story. As a story, a comedy, I think _Otto_ very well constructed; the echoes are very good, all the sentiments change round, and the points of view are continually, and, I think (if you please), happily contrasted. None of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling. R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY The verses alluded to are some of those afterwards collected in _Underwoods_. [_Chalet la Solitude, Hyeres, May or June 1883._] DEAR HENLEY,--You may be surprised to hear that I am now a great writer of verses; that is, however, so. I have the mania now like my betters, and faith, if I live till I am forty, I shall have a book of rhymes like Pollock, Gosse, or whom you please. Really, I have begun to learn some of the rudiments of that trade, and have written three or four pretty enough pieces of octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling. A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse, and you behold the Bard. But I like it. R. L. S. TO JULES SIMONEAU This friend was the keeper of the inn and restaurant where Stevenson had boarded at Monterey in the autumn of 1879. In writing French, as will be seen, Stevenson had always more grip of idiom than of grammar. [_La Solitude, Hyeres, May or June 1883_.] MON CHER ET BON SIMONEAU,--J'ai commence plusieurs fois de vous ecrire; et voila-t-il pas qu'un empechement quelconque est arrive toujours. La lettre ne part pas; et je vous laisse toujours dans le droit de soupconner mon coeur. Mon bon ami, ne pensez pas que je vous ai oublie ou que je vous oublierai jamais. Il n'en est de rien. Votre bon souvenir me tient de bien pres, et je le garderai jusqu'a la mort. J'ai failli mourir de bien pres; mais me voici bien retabli, bien que toujours un peu chetif et malingre. J'habite, comme vous voyez, la France. Je travaille beaucoup, et je commence a ne pas etre le dernier; deja on me dispute ce que j'ecris, et je n'ai pas a me plaindre de ce que l'on appelle les honoraires. Me voici alors tres affaire, tres heureux dans mon menage, gate par ma femme, habitant la plus petite maisonette dans le plus beau jardin du monde, et voyant de mes fen etres la mer, les isles d'Hyeres, et les belles collines, montagnes et forts de Toulon.