I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please you; it pleased me. But I do desire a book of adventure--a romance--and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like _Treasure Island_, alas! which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety. I would God that some one else had written it! By all that I can learn, it is the very book for my complaint. I like the way I hear it opens; and they tell me John Silver is good fun. And to me it is, and must ever be, a dream unrealised, a book unwritten. O my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither! CHAPTER I The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveller, when the sound of wheels---- CHAPTER I "Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks." "She shows no colours," returned the young gentleman musingly. "They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her." "Ay," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff." "God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift. CHAPTER I The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging from one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Little did he think what strange adventures were to befall him!---- That is how stories should begin. And I am offered HUSKS instead. What should be: What is: The Filibuster's Cache. Aunt Anne's Tea Cosy. Jerry Abershaw. Mrs. Brierly's Niece. Blood Money: A Tale. Society: A Novel. R. L. S. TO THE REV. PROFESSOR LEWIS CAMPBELL In reply to a gift of books, including the correspondent's well-known translation of Sophocles. [_Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884._]