As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid; this puts me to a stand in the way of visits. But it is possible that some day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be a pleasant change from town. If so, please let us know; and my wife and I will be delighted to put you up and give you what we can to eat and drink (I have a fair bottle of claret).--On the back of which, believe me, yours sincerely,
P.S.--I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper! What fine remarks can you not hang on mine! How I have sinned against proportion and, with every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of courtesy to you! You are, indeed, a very acute reader to have divined the real attitude of my mind, and I can only conclude, not without closed eyes and shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words
[During a crippling fit of ill-health, Stevenson had received a commission for a sensational story for the Christmas number of the _Pall Mall Gazette_. The commission ended in his sending the managers of the paper a recast of a gruesome tale which he had written and condemned in the Highlands three years before, _The Body-Snatcher_. He rightly thought this beneath his own standard of merit, and would not take the full fee which had been offered for it. Two of the following letters to Mr. Henley refer to this matter: Bloody Jack, or Jacques, let it be understood, was his regular nickname for his arch-enemy, hemorrhage from the lungs.]
DEAR MAN,--1st Disagreeable. Do try and lay your hands on these three poems; they were surely not lost in transmission? It seems hard I should have to make them a _third_ time.
2d Disagreeable. I have done a kind of a damned machine for the P. M. G., and have near died of it--(weakness, insomnia, Bloody Jacquerie)--and am now so dissatisfied that I have told them not to pay me till I see a proof. I think, or I fear I will think, it is not worth the money offered; in which case, of course, I will not take it.--Yours ever,