Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 28, 1898 - Appendix

PREFACE AND
engineers ; one of them gained the silver medal of the Royal Scottish
Society of Arts : and it has been ascertained that to some of those
interested in his career their inclusion in this place will be welcome. I
liave prefixed to them two sets of lighthouse verses from his notebooks
of I869 and 1870, one written in a sentimental, the other in some-
what of a cynic mood, which show what used to be the private thoughts
and real preoccupations of the youthful engineer on his professional
rounds. Next follow three pieces not before printed from his later
notebooks. In Reflections and Remarks on Human Life we have
the draft of some chapters of an unfinished treatise on morals and
conduct, subjects on which he always wrote in the spirit of a keen and
thoughtful soldier in the battle of life : in one of these chapters it will
be noticed that he deals with the problems of free-tvill and rewards
and punishments on the same lines as in the brilliant little apologue
already published as No. 1 of his Fables (Edin. ed. Tales and
Fantasies, vol. iv. p. 337), but at greater length. The Ideal
House belongs to the winter of 1884-5, and sets forth the predilec-
tions, as to the site and arrangements of a home, of one who had for
years been a vagrant, priding himself on his freedom from local ties
and the burden of the world's gear. But by this time he had become
the head of a household, and having tried two domiciles in Provence,
was about to take possession of a new one on the English coast at
Bournemouth. Then follows the Preface to the Master of
Ballantrae, written in the Pacific in 1889, with reminiscences of
the office in Edinburgh of his old friend Mr. Charles Baxter, W.S.
When he published the book in that year, he decided to suppress
his preface, as being too much i?i the vein of Jedediah Cleishbotham
and Mr. Peter Pattieson ; but afterwards he expressed a wish that it
should be given with the Edinburgh edition. At that time, however, the
manuscript had gone astray, and the text has now been recovered from
his original draft. Next come facsimiles of the little Davos Press cuts
and verses, written and engraved by R. L. S. in child's play at odd times
between the autumn of 1880 and the summer of 1882, and printed, with
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