What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas my book produces naught so nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit. I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself. -- I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man. -- 'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may please in frivolous circles. To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader: -- if it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine. As a young man, Stevenson desired to be financially independent so that he might pursue the woman he loved, and set about funding his freedom from parental support by writing travelogues, the most prominent being An Inland Voyage.