MY DEAR GOSSE,--This Mr. Morley[12] of yours is a most desperate fellow. He has sent me (for my opinion) the most truculent advertisement I ever saw, in which the white hairs of Gladstone are dragged round Troy behind my chariot wheels. What can I say? I say nothing to him; and to you, I content myself with remarking that he seems a desperate fellow. All luck to you on your American adventure; may you find health, wealth, and entertainment! If you see, as you likely will, Frank R. Stockton, pray greet him from me in words to this effect:-- My Stockton if I failed to like, It were a sheer depravity, For I went down with the _Thomas Hyke_ And up with the _Negative Gravity_! I adore these tales. I hear flourishing accounts of your success at Cambridge, so you leave with a good omen. Remember me to _green corn_ if it is in season; if not, you had better hang yourself on a sour apple tree, for your voyage has been lost.--Yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO AUSTIN DOBSON Written in acknowledgment of the gift of a desk. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884 ?]._ DEAR DOBSON,--Set down my delay to your own fault; I wished to acknowledge such a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes; but you should have sent me your pen and not your desk. The verses stand up to the axles in a miry cross-road, whence the coursers of the sun shall never draw them; hence I am constrained to this uncourtliness, that I must appear before one of the kings of that country of rhyme without my singing robes. For less than this, if we may trust the book of Esther, favourites have tasted death; but I conceive the kingdom of the Muses mildlier mannered; and in particular that county which you administer and which I seem to see as a half-suburban land; a land of hollyhocks and country houses; a land where at night, in thorny and sequestered bypaths, you will meet masqueraders going to a ball in their sedans, and the rector steering homeward by the light of his lantern; a land of the windmill, and the west wind, and the flowering hawthorn with a little scented letter in the hollow of its trunk, and the kites flying over all in the season of kites, and the far away blue spires of a cathedral city. Will you forgive me, then, for my delay and accept my thanks not only for your present, but for the letter which followed it, and which perhaps I more particularly value, and believe me to be, with much admiration, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY Stevenson and his wife were still busy on _More New Arabian Nights_ (the romance of the _Great North Road_ having been begun and postponed). The question here touched is, to what publishers should they be offered. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 1884._