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for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his
portmanteau.
Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and now a
positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy style.
Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men', one reader may
prefer the one style, one the other--'tis an affair of character,
perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much
more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as
though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn
out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe
alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to
it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early
paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was
empty; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom; and
here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the
'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them, living for the most part
alone, walking on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a
good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I
can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was
thirty-one; I was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had
never yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father
had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was judged
a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I was indeed
very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the
journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the
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