CHAPTER XLII
_Aug._ 7_th_.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—This is to inform you, sir, that on Sunday last (and this is Tuesday) I attained my ideal here, and we had a paper chase in Vailele Plantation, about 15 miles, I take it, from us; and it was all that could be wished. It is really better fun than following the hounds, since you have to be your own hound, and a precious bad hound I was, following every false scent on the whole course to the bitter end; but I came in 3rd at the last on my little Jack, who stuck to it gallantly, and awoke the praises of some discriminating persons. (5 + 7 + 2.5 = 14.5 miles; yes, that is the count.) We had quite the old sensations of exhilaration, discovery, an appeal to a savage instinct; and I felt myself about 17 again, a pleasant experience. However, it was on the Sabbath Day, and I am now a pariah among the English, as if I needed any increment of unpopularity. I must not go again; it gives so much unnecessary tribulation to poor people, and, sure, we don’t want to make tribulation. I have been forbidden to work, and have been instead doing my two or three hours in the plantation every morning. I only wish somebody would pay me £10 a day for taking care of cacao, and I could leave literature to others. Certainly, if I have plenty of exercise, and no work, I feel much better; but there is Biles the butcher! him we have always with us.
I do not much like novels, I begin to think, but I am enjoying exceedingly Orme’s _History of Hindostan_, a lovely book in its way, in large quarto, with a quantity of maps, and written in a very lively and solid eighteenth century way, never picturesque except by accident and from a kind of conviction, and a fine sense of order. No historian I have ever read is so minute; yet he never gives you a word about the people; his interest is entirely limited in the concatenation of events, into which he goes with a lucid, almost superhuman, and wholly ghostly gusto. ‘By the ghost of a mathematician’ the book might be announced. A very brave, honest book.
Your letter to hand.
Fact is, I don’t like the picter. O, it’s a good picture, but if you _ask_ me, you know, I believe, stoutly believe, that mankind, including you, are going mad, I am not in the midst with the other frenzy dancers, so I don’t catch it wholly; and when you show me a thing—and ask me, don’t you know—Well, well! Glad to get so good an account of the _Amateur Emigrant_. Talking of which, I am strong for making a volume out of selections from the South Sea letters; I read over again the King of Apemama, and it is good in spite of your teeth, and a real curiosity, a thing that can never be seen again, and the group is annexed and Tembinoka dead. I wonder, couldn’t you send out to me the _first_ five Butaritari letters and the Low Archipelago ones (both of which I have lost or mislaid) and I can chop out a perfectly fair volume of what I wish to be preserved. It can keep for the last of the series.
_Travels and Excursions_, vol. II. Should it not include a paper on S. F. from the _Mag. of Art_? The A. E., the New Pacific capital, the Old ditto. _Silver. Squat._ This would give all my works on the States; and though it ain’t very good, it’s not so very bad. _Travels and Excursions_, vol. III., to be these resuscitated letters—_Miscellanies_, vol. II.—_comme vous voudrez_, _cher monsieur_!
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_Monday_, Aug. 13_th_.
I have a sudden call to go up the coast and must hurry up with my information. There has suddenly come to our naval commanders the need of
## action, they’re away up the coast bombarding the Atua rebels. All
morning on Saturday the sound of the bombardment of Lotuanu’u kept us uneasy. To-day again the big guns have been sounding further along the coast.
To-morrow morning early I am off up the coast myself. Therefore you must allow me to break off here without further ceremony.—Yours ever,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
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