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The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends Author:Robert Louis Stevenson, Sidney Colvin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: thought! — have specially delighted me. — I am, dear sir, your respected friend, John Gregg Gillson, J.P., M.R.I.A., etc. To Sidney Colvin The following... more » narrates the beginning of the author's labours on " The Master of Ballantrae." An unfinished paper written some years later in Samoa, and intended for Scribner's Magazine, tells how the story first took shape in his mind. See Thistle edition, " Sketches, Crit1cisms, etc.," vol. xxii. p. 431. [saranac Lake, December 24, 1887.] My Dear Colvin, — Thank you for your explanations. I have done no more Virgil since I f1nished the seventh book, for I have first been eaten up with Taine, and next have fallen head over heels into a new tale, "The Master of Ballantrae." No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page ninety-two of the draft with great interest. It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements; the most is a dead genuine human problem — human tragedy, I should say rather. It will be about as long, I imagine, as " Kidnapped." DRAMATIS PERSONA: (1) My old Lord Durrisdeer. (2) The Master of Ballantrae, and (3) Henry Durie, his sons. (4) Clementina, engaged to the first, mar ried to the second. (5) Ephraim Mackellar, land steward atDurrisdecr and narrator of the most of the book. (6) Francis Burke, Chevalier de St. Louis, one of Prince Charlie's Irishmen and narrator of the rest. Besides these, many instant figures, most of them dumb or nearly so: Jessie Brown the whore, Captain Crail, Captain MacCombie, our old friend Alan Breck, our old friend Riach (both only for an instant), Teach the pirate (vulgarly Black- beard), John Paul and Macconochie, servants at Durrisdeer. The date is from 1745 to '65 (about). The scene, near Kirkcudbright, in the State...« less