You will be interested, I believe, to see the difference in our treatments.

_Secreta Vitae_ [the title of one of Mr.
Gosse's poems] comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie." From the wonderful midnight scene between her and Archie, we may judge what we have lost in those later scenes where she was to have taxed him with the fault that was not his--to have presently learned his innocence from the lips of his supposed victim--to have then vindicated him to her kinsmen and fired them to the action of his rescue.

The scene of the prison-breaking here planned by Stevenson would have gained interest (as will already have occurred to readers) from comparison with the two famous precedents in Scott, the Porteous mob and the breaking of Portanferry jail.
The best account of Stevenson's methods of imaginative work is in the following sentences from a letter of his own to Mr.W.Craibe Angus of Glasgow:--"I am still 'a slow study,' and sit for a long while silent on my eggs.

Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there your stuff is--good or bad." The several elements above noted having been left to work for many years in his mind, it was in the autumn of 1892 that he was moved to "take the lid off and look in,"-- under the influence, it would seem, of a special and overmastering wave of that feeling for the romance of Scottish scenery and character which was at all times so strong in him, and which his exile did so much to intensify.
I quote again from his letter to Mr.Barrie on November 1st in that year:--"It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come.
I have finished _David Balfour_, I have another book on the stocks, _The Young Chevalier_, which is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done but begun a third, which is to be all moorland together, and is to have for a centre-piece a figure that I think you will appreciate--that of the immortal Braxfield.

Braxfield himself is my grand premier--or since you are so much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy lead." Writing to me at the same date he makes the same announcement more briefly, with a list of the characters and an indication of the scene and date of the story.