It was begun in the late summer of 1886, and was my first attempt at telling a story on paper. I am careful to say 'on paper,' because in childhood I was telling myself stories from morning to night. Tens of thousands of small boys are doing the same every day in the year; but I should be sorry to guess how much of my time, between the ages of seven and thirteen, must have been given up to weaving these childish epics. They were curious jumbles; the characters (of which I had a constant set) being drawn indiscriminately from the 'Morte d'Arthur,' 'Bunyan's Holy War,' 'Pope's Iliad,' 'Ivanhoe,' and a book of Fairy Tales by Holme Lee, as well as from history; and the themes ranging from battles and tournaments to cricket, wrestling, and sailing matches. Anachronisms never troubled the story-teller. The Duke of Wellington would cheerfully break a lance with Captain Credence or Tristram of Lyonesse, and I rarely made up a football fifteen without including Hardicanute (whom I loved for his name), Hector (dear for his own sake) and Wamba (who supplied the comic interest and scored off Thersites). They were brave companions; but at the age of thirteen they deserted me suddenly. Or perhaps after reading Mr. Stevenson's 'Chapter on Dreams,' I had better say it was the Piskies—the Small People—who deserted me. They alone know why—for their pensioner had never betrayed a single one of their secrets—or why in these later times, when he sells their confidences for money, they have come back to help him, though more sparingly. Three or four of the little stories in 'Noughts and Crosses' are but translated dreams, and there are others in my notebook; but now I never compose without some pain, whereas in the old days I had but to sit alone in a corner or take a solitary walk and invite them, and they did all the work. But one summer evening I summoned them and met with no response. Without warning the tales had come to an end.

From my first school at Newton Abbot I went to Clifton, and from Clifton in my nineteenth year to Oxford. It was here that the old desire to weave stories began to come back. Mr. Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' was the immediate cause. I had been scribbling all through my school days; had written a prodigious quantity of bad reflective poetry and burnt it as soon as I really began to reflect; and was now plying the Oxford Magazine with light verse, a large proportion of which was lately reprinted in a thin volume, with the title of 'Green Bays.' But I wrote little or no prose. My prose essays at school were execrable. I had followed after false models for a while, and when gently made aware of this by the sound and kindly scholar who looked over our sixth-form essays at Clifton, had turned dispirited and wrote scarcely at all. Though reading great quantities of fiction, I had, as has been said, no thought of telling a story, and so far as I knew, no faculty. The desire, at least, was awakened by 'Treasure Island,' and, in explanation of this, I can only quote the gentleman who reviewed my first book in the Athenæum, and observed that 'great wits jump, and lesser wits jump with them.' That is just the truth of it. I began as a pupil and imitator of Mr. Stevenson, and was lucky in my choice of a master.

The germ of 'Dead Man's Rock' was a curious little bit of family lore, which I may extract from my father's history of Polperro, a small haven on the Cornish coast. The Richard Quiller of whom he speaks is my great grandfather.

'In the old home of the Quillers, at Polperro, there was hanging on a beam a key, which we as children regarded with respect and awe, and never dared to touch, for Richard Quiller had put the key of his quadrant on a nail, with strong injunctions that no one should take it off until his return (which never happened), and there, I believe, it still hangs. His brother John served for several years as commander of a hired armed lugger, employed in carrying despatches in the French war, Richard accompanying him as subordinate officer. They were engaged in the inglorious bombardment of Flushing in 1809. Some short time after this they were taken, after a desperate fight with a pirate, into Algiers, but were liberated on the severe remonstrances of the British Consul. They returned to their homes in most miserable plight, having lost their all, except their Bible, much valued then by the unfortunate sailors, and now by a descendant in whose possession it is. About the year 1812 these same brothers sailed to the island of Teneriffe in an armed merchant ship, but after leaving that place were never heard of.'

Here, then, I had the simple apparatus for a mystery; for, of course, the key must be made to unlock something far more uncommon than a quadrant; and I still think it a capital apparatus, had I only possessed the wit to use it properly. There was romance in this key—that was obvious enough, and I puzzled over it for some weeks, by the end of which my plot had grown to something like this: A family living in poverty, though heirs to great wealth—this wealth buried close to their door, and the key to unlock it hanging over their heads from morning to night. It was soon settled, too, that this family should be Cornish, and the scene laid on the Cornish coast, Cornwall being the only corner of the earth with which I had more than a superficial acquaintance.

So far, so good; but what was the treasure to be? And what the reason that stood between its inheritors and their enjoyment of it? As it happened, these two questions were answered together. The small library at Trinity—a delightful room, where Dr. Johnson spent many quiet hours at work upon his 'Dictionary'—is fairly rich in books of old travel and discovery; fine folios, for the most part, filling the shelves on your left as you enter. To the study of these I gave up a good many hours that should have been spent on ancient history of another pattern, and more directly profitable for Greats; and in one of them—Purchas, I think, but will not swear—first came on the Great Ruby of Ceylon. Not long after, a note in Yule's edition of 'Marco Polo' set my imagination fairly in chase of this remarkable gem; and I hunted up all the accessible authorities. The size of this ruby (as thick as a man's arm, says Marco Polo, while Maundevile, who was an artist, and lied with exactitude, puts it at a foot in length and five fingers in girth), its colour, 'like unto fire,' and the mystery and completeness of its disappearance, combined to fascinate me. No form of riches is so romantic as a precious stone with a heart in it and a history. I had only to endow it with a curse proportionate to its size and beauty, and I had all that a story-teller could possibly want.

But even a treasure hunt is a poor affair unless you have two parties vying for the booty, and a curse can hardly be worked effectively until you introduce the fighting element, and make destiny strike her blows through the passions—hate, greed, &c.—of her victims. I had shaped my story to this point: the treasure was to be buried by a man who had slain his comrade and only confidant in order to enjoy the booty alone, and had afterwards become aware of the curse attached to its possession. And the descendants of these two men were to be rivals in the search for it, each side possessing half of the clue. It was at this point that, like George IV., I invented a buckle. My buckle had two clasps, and on these the secret of the treasure was so engraved as to become intelligible only when they were united.

My plot had now taken something like a shape; but it had one serious defect. It would not start to walk. Coax it as I might it would not budge. Even the worst book must have a beginning—this reflection was no less distressing than obvious, for mine had none. And there is no saying it would ever have found one but for a lucky accident.

In the Long Vacation of 1885 I spent three weeks or a month at the Lizard pollacking and reading Plato. Knowing at that time comparatively little of this corner of the coast, I had brought one or two guide books and local histories in the bottom of my portmanteau. One evening, after a stiff walk along the cliffs, I put the 'Republic' aside for a certain 'History and Description of the Parish of Mullyon,' by its vicar, the Rev. E. G. Harvey, and came upon a passage that immediately shook my scraps of invention into their proper places.