The memory here evoked of Brash the publican, who had been a special
butt for some of the youthful pranks of R. L. S. and his friends,
inspired in the next few weeks the sets of verses mentioned below
(vol. 24, pp. 14, 15, 38) in letters which show that the fictitious
Johnson and Thomson were far from being dead.
_[Chalet am Stein], Davos, December 5, 1881._
MY DEAR CHARLES,--We have been in miserable case here; my wife worse and
worse; and now sent away with Lloyd for sick nurse, I not being allowed
to go down. I do not know what is to become of us; and you may imagine
how rotten I have been feeling, and feel now, alone with my weasel-dog
and my German maid, on the top of a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow
all about me, and the devil to pay in general. I don't care so much for
solitude as I used to; results, I suppose, of marriage.
Pray write me something cheery. A little Edinburgh gossip, in Heaven's
name. Ah! what would I not give to steal this evening with you through
the big, echoing, college archway, and away south under the street
lamps, and away to dear Brash's, now defunct! But the old time is dead
also, never, never to revive. It was a sad time too, but so gay and so
hopeful, and we had such sport with all our low spirits and all our
distresses, that it looks like a kind of lamplit fairyland behind me. O
for ten Edinburgh minutes--sixpence between us, and the ever-glorious
Lothian Road, or dear mysterious Leith Walk! But here, a sheer hulk,
lies poor Tom Bowling; here in this strange place, whose very
strangeness would have been heaven to him then; and aspires, yes, C. B.,
with tears, after the past. See what comes of being left alone. Do you
remember Brash? the sheet of glass that we followed along George Street?
Granton? the night at Bonny mainhead? the compass near the sign of the
_Twinkling Eye_? the night I lay on the pavement in misery?
I swear it by the eternal sky
Johnson--nor--Thomson ne'er shall die!
Yet I fancy they are dead too; dead like Brash.