MY DEAR PEOPLE,--A Good New Year to you. The year closes, leaving me with L50 in the bank, owing no man nothing, L100 more due to me in a week or so, and L150 more in the course of the month; and I can look back on a total receipt of L465, 0s. 6d. for the last twelve months! And yet I am not happy! Yet I beg! Here is my beggary:-- 1. Sellar's Trial. 2. George Borrow's Book about Wales. 3. My Grandfather's Trip to Holland. 4. And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock Book. When I think of how last year began, after four months of sickness and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind of spectre, for Nice--should I not be grateful? Come, let us sing unto the Lord! Nor should I forget the expected visit, but I will not believe in that till it befall; I am no cultivator of disappointments, 'tis a herb that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good crops both of remorse and gratitude. The last I can recommend to all gardeners; it grows best in shiny weather, but once well grown, is very hardy; it does not require much labour; only that the husbandman should smoke his pipe about the flower-plots and admire God's pleasant wonders. Winter green (otherwise known as Resignation, or the "false gratitude plant") springs in much the same soil; is little hardier, if at all; and requires to be so dug about and dunged, that there is little margin left for profit. The variety known as the Black Winter green (H. V. Stevensoniana) is rather for ornament than profit. "John, do you see that bed of resignation?"--"It's doin' bravely, sir."--"John, I will not have it in my garden; it flatters not the eye and comforts not the stomach; root it out."--"Sir, I ha'e seen o' them that rase as high as nettles; gran' plants!"--"What then? Were they as tall as alps, if still unsavoury and bleak, what matters it? Out with it, then; and in its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that capital home evergreen), and a bush of Flowering Piety--but see it be the flowering sort--the other species is no ornament to any gentleman's Back Garden." JNO. BUNYAN. TO W. E. HENLEY Early in January, Stevenson, after a week's visit at Hyeres from his friends Charles Baxter and W. E. Henley, accompanied them as far as Nice, and there suddenly went down with an attack of acute congestion, first of the lungs and then of the kidneys. At one moment there seemed no hope, but he recovered slowly and returned to Hyeres. His friends had not written during his illness, fearing him to be too far gone to care for letters. As he got better he began to chafe at their silence. _[Hyeres, February or March 1884]._ TANDEM DESINO* I cannot read, work, sleep, lie still, walk, or even play patience. These plagues will overtake all damned silencists; among whom, from this day out, number Eructavit cor Timonis.** the fiery indignator Roland Little Stevenson.