Derelict
Mr. Allison’s mind, and he began to wonder if it would be permissible to introduce the trace of a woman on board the Derelict. Up to this point he had tried to develop his theme strictly in accordance with the Stevensonian spirit—and there was no woman in Treasure Island. But after all Billy Bones’s song had nothing to do with the Hispaniola—it was a reminiscence of his own past, in which doubtless more than one woman had played a part! So why not? And Mr. Allison went to work in his usual careful fashion on what was to become one of the most striking stanzas of the poem. He even consulted a girl as to whether it should be a “flimsy shift” or a “filmy shift”—a perilous thing to do, but by good luck the girl preferred flimsy. And he decided that this stanza should be set in italics to show that it was, in a way, an interpolation.
In 1901, the editors of the Rubric, a magazine published in Chicago, having happened upon the poem somewhere, and also having learned by some strange chance that Mr. Allison was its author, wrote him asking his permission to use it. He not only consented, but sent them the revised version with the new stanza about the woman, and the poem was published very happily illustrated in two colors and occupying eight pages of the magazine. It was called “On Board the Derelict,” and the issue of the maga-
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