To Charles Baxter
Finished on the way to Honolulu for a health change which turned out unfortunate. With the help of Mr. J.H. Stevenson and other correspondents he had now, as we have seen, been able (regretfully giving up the possibility of a Macgregor lineage) to identify his forbears as having about 1670 been tenant farmers at Nether Carsewell in Renfrewshire. The German government at home had taken his Footnote to History much less kindly than his German neighbours on the spot, and the Tauchnitz edition had been confiscated and destroyed and its publisher fined.
[Vailima, and s.s. Mariposa, September 1893.]
MY DEAR CHARLES,—Here is a job for you. It appears that about 1665, or earlier, James Stevenson {in of} Nether Carsewell, parish of Neilston, flourished. Will you kindly send an able-bodied reader to compulse the parish registers of Neilston, if they exist or go back as far? Also could any trace be found through Nether-Carsewell? I expect it to have belonged to Mure of Cauldwell. If this be so, might not the Cauldwell charter chest contain some references to their Stevenson tenantry? Perpend upon it. But clap me on the judicious, able-bodied reader on the spot. Can I really have found the tap-root of my illustrious ancestry at last? Souls of my fathers! What a giggle-iggle-orious moment! I have drawn on you for £400. Also I have written to Tauchnitz announcing I should bear one-half part of his fines and expenses, amounting to £62, 10s. The £400 includes £160 which I have laid out here in land. Vanu Manutagi—the vale of crying birds (the wild dove)—is now mine: it was Fanny’s wish and she is to buy it from me again when she has made that much money.
Will you please order for me through your bookseller the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest—if that be her name—and the original of Cook’s voyages lately published? Also, I see announced a map of the Great North Road: you might see what it is like: if it is highly detailed, or has any posting information, I should like it.
This is being finished on board the Mariposa going north. I am making the run to Honolulu and back for health’s sake. No inclination to write more.—As ever,
R. L. S.
To Sidney Colvin
On a first reading of the incomplete MS. of The Ebb Tide, without its concluding chapters, which are the strongest, dislike of the three detestable—or rather two detestable and one contemptible—chief characters had made me unjust to the imaginative force and vividness of the treatment.