Dedication

My Dear Charles Baxter,

If you ever read this tale, you will likely ask yourself more questions
than I should care to answer: as for instance how the Appin murder has come to
fall in the year 1751, how the Torran rocks have crept so near to Earraid, or
why the printed trial is silent as to all that touches David Balfour. These are
nuts beyond my ability to crack. But if you tried me on the point of Alan's
guilt or innocence, I think I could defend the reading of the text. To this day
you will find the tradition of Appin clear in Alan's favor. If you inquire, you
may even hear that the descendants of "the other man" who fired the shots are in
the country to this day. But that other man's name, inquire as you please, you
shall not hear; for the Highlander values a secret for itself and for the
congenial exercise of keeping it. I might go on for long to justify one point
and own another indefensible; it is more honest to confess at once how little I
am touched by the desire of accuracy. This is no furniture for the scholar's
library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over
and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was grim old fireeater in
his day, has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some
young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands
and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle
with his dreams.
As for you, my dear Charle3s, I do not even ask you to like this tale. But
perhaps when he is older, your son will; he may then be pleased to find his
father's name on the fly-leaf; and in the meanwhile it pleases me to set it
there, in memory of many days that were happy and some (now perhaps as pleasant
to remember) that were sad. If it is strange for me to look back from a distance
both in time and space on those bygone adventures of our youth, it must be
stranger for you who tread the same streets--who may to-morrow open the door of
the old Speculative, where we begin to rank with Scott and Robert Emmet and the
belovbed and inglorious Macbean--or may pass the chorner of the close where that
great society, the L.J.R., held its meetings and drank its beer, sitting in the
seats of Burns and his companions. I think I see you, moving there by plain
daylight, beholding with your natural eyes those places that have now become for
your companion a part of the scenery of dreams. How, in the intervals of present
business, the past must echo in your memory! Let it not echo often without some
kind thoughts of your friend,

R.L.S.

Skerryvore,

Bournemouth

"Kidnapped"

Robert Louis Stevenson

That sort of passage can hold me over for months...but it won't, not this time. I will devour the story in a matter of days, and on to the next adventure......