On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire,
and the rain drumming on the window, I began THE SEA COOK,
for that was the original title. I have begun (and finished)
a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat
down to one of them with more complacency. It is not to be
wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am
now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once
belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is
conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles
and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of
skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I
am told, is from MASTERMAN READY. It may be, I care not a
jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying:
departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands
of time, Footprints which perhaps another - and I was the
other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my
conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was
rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the TALES OF A
TRAVELLER some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose
narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,
his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner
spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first
chapters - all were there, all were the property of
Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat
writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a
somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after
lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78