《Kidnapped 》作者：- Robert Louis Stevenson【EPUB】

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my husband preferred but the torrent of Mr. Henleys enthusiasm swept him off his feet. However after several plays had been finished and his health seriously impaired by his endeavours to keep up with Mr. Henley play writing was abandoned forever and my husband returned to his legitimate vocation. Having added one of the titles The Hanging Judge to the list of projected plays now thrown aside and emboldened by my husbands offer to give me any help needed I concluded to try and write it myself. As I wanted a trial scene in the Old Bailey I chose the period of 1700 for my purpose but being shamefully ignorant of my subject and my husband confessing to little more knowledge than I possessed a London bookseller was commissioned to send us everything he could procure bearing on Old Bailey trials. A great package came in response to our order and very soon we were both absorbed not so much in the trials as in following the brilliant career of a Mr. Garrow who appeared as counsel in many of the cases. We sent for more books and yet more still intent on Mr. Garrow whose subtle cross-examination of witnesses and masterly if sometimes startling methods of arriving at the truth seemed more thrilling to us than any novel. Occasionally other trials than those of the Old Bailey would be included in the package of books we received from London among these my husband found and read with avidity:— THE TRIAL OF JAMES STEWART in Aucharn in Duror of Appin FOR THE Murder of COLIN CAMPBELL of Glenure Efq Factor for His Majefty on the forfeited Estate of Ardfhiel. My husband was always interested in this period of his countrys history and had already the intention of writing a story that should turn on the Appin murder. The tale was to be of a boy David Balfour supposed to belong to my husbands own family who should travel in Scotland as though it eBook-cafe.com 4 were a foreign country meeting with various adventures and misadventures by the way. From the trial of James Stewart my husband gleaned much valuable material for his novel the most important being the character of Alan Breck. Aside from having described him as quotsmallish in staturequot my husband seems to have taken Alan Brecks personal appearance even to his clothing from the book. A letter from James Stewart to Mr. John Macfarlane introduced as evidence in the trial says: quotThere is one Alan Stewart a distant friend of the late Ardshiels who is in the French service and came over in March last as he said to some in order to settle at home to others that he was to go soon back and was as I hear the day that the murder was committed