Publisher's Receipt Signed -- for "A Song of the Road by Stevenson, Robert Louis - 1885

1885. One 5"x8" printed receipt form, with the date, amount and applicable poems entered by secretarial hand, then signed in full by Stevenson. London: Cassell & Company, 23 December 1885.

This receipt acknowledges payment of two guineas to Stevenson for "the use of my Poem entitled 'A Song of the Road' in 'The Magazine of Art', appearing in Part 63." This poem of seven four-line stanzas did indeed appear in the January 1886 issue of that magazine, and was then (in 1887) included in the Stevenson volume of verse UNDERWOODS, published by Chatto & Windus. At the end of this poem in that volume, it reads "Forest of Montargis, 1878" -- for RLS wrote the first version of this poem after his 1875 walking tour around France. He then called it (in his notebook, now at Yale) "The Gauger's Flute" -- as the poem is about a gauger (excise officer) who plays on his flute a refrain "Over the hills and far away" as a warning when he approaches his friend's hidden distillery. Interestingly, this is one of the poems that RLS put to music late in life, when he learned to play a "flageolet" -- essentially a pennywhistle with keys. The receipt is in near-fine condition, with a couple of small edge-chips; the receipt was folded and notated by the publisher's staff for filing purposes. It provides a clear, full signature of Stevenson.