Chapter I

. This I would read to him, and if satisfactory it was laid to one side; but were it not, I would rewrite it, embodying his criticisms. Each chapter in turn was fully discussed in advance before I put pen to paper; and in this way, though the actual first draft was in my own hand, the form of the story continually took shape under Stevenson's eyes. When my first draft of the entire book was finished he would rewrite it again from cover to cover.

I can remember nothing more delightful than the days we thus passed together. If our three books are in no wise great, they preserve, it seems to me, something of the zest and exhilaration that went into their making--the good humour, the eagerness.

We were both under the glamour of the Islands--and that life, so strange, so picturesque, so animated, took us both by storm. Kings and beachcombers, pearl-fishers and princesses, traders, slavers, and schooner-captains, castaways, and runaways--what a world it was! And all this in a fairyland of palms, and glassy bays, and little lost settlements nestling at the foot of forest and mountain, with kings to make brotherhood with us, and a dubious white man or two, in earrings and pyjamas, no less insistent to extend to us the courtesies of the "beach."

It was amid such people, and amid such scenes, that "The Ebb-Tide" and "The Wrecker" were written.

LLOYD OSBOURNE.

## PART I

THE TRIO

THE EBB-TIDE

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