The publication of the Stevenson letters revived interest in his career, both as man and writer. His first published book, as our readers will remember, was “The Pentland Rising,” a pamphlet of twenty pages issued in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1866, when the author was but sixteen. At the time of Stevenson’s death copies of this little work were sold for upwards of £20 a piece, but the price afterwards fell considerably. In 1868, he wrote the “Charity Bazaar,” a boyish skit, filling four pages quarto, and which was privately printed. His next appearance in print seems to have been in the pages of a college paper, the Edinburgh University Magazine, which he and three fellow-students edited, and which lived through four numbers only. These numbers were issued from January to April, 1871. He says:

“A pair of little active brothers—Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the University building—had been debauched to play the part of publishers.”

The first number was edited by all four associates, the second by Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier, the third by Stevenson alone, and of the last he says: “It has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth,” and then: “It would perhaps be still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones’ window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night.”

Stevenson contributed six articles to the four numbers, one of which, “An Old Scotch Gardener,” he revised and reprinted in “Memories and Portraits.”It will be news to many people that Stevenson was awarded the silver of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts for a paper entitled “A Notice of a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses.” This paper was printed separately from the Transactions of the Society in a thin pamphlet, consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the headlines, “Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses,” and contains five illustrations in the text.—Publishers’ Circular.