MY DEAR LAD,-- ... Of course, my seamanship is jimmy: did I not beseech you I know not how often to find me an ancient mariner--and you, whose own wife's own brother is one of the ancientest, did nothing for me? As for my seamen, did Runciman ever know eighteenth century Buccaneers? No? Well, no more did I. But I have known and sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them; and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but as a put-up thing has to be made, _i.e._ to be coherent and picturesque, and damn the expense. Are they fairly lively on the wires? Then, favour me with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim, and no sport? Then it is I that am silent, otherwise not. The work, strange as it may sound in the ear, is not a work of realism. The next thing I shall hear is that the etiquette is wrong in Otto's Court! With a warrant, and I mean it to be so, and the whole matter never cost me half a thought. I make these paper people to please myself, and Skelt, and God Almighty, and with no ulterior purpose. Yet am I mortal myself; for, as I remind you, I begged for a supervising mariner. However, my heart is in the right place. I have been to sea, but I never crossed the threshold of a court; and the courts shall be the way I want 'em. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had; the one I liked best before that was ----'s on the _Arabians_. These two are the flowers of the collection, according to me. To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans--sich is my aspiration. Whenever you come you will be equally welcome. I am trying to finish _Otto_ ere you shall arrive, so as to take and be able to enjoy a well-earned--O yes, a well-earned--holiday. Longman fetched by _Otto_: is it a spoon or a spoilt horn? Momentous, if the latter; if the former, a spoon to dip much praise and pudding, and to give, I do think, much pleasure. The last part, now in hand, much smiles upon me.--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyeres [November 1883]._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--You must not blame me too much for my silence; I am over head and ears in work, and do not know what to do first. I have been hard at _Otto_, hard at _Silverado_ proofs, which I have worked over again to a tremendous extent; cutting, adding, rewriting, until some of the worst chapters of the original are now, to my mind, as good as any. I was the more bound to make it good, as I had such liberal terms; it's not for want of trying if I have failed.