The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Appendix

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1898

Volume XXVIII of the Edinburgh Edition, the supplementary Appendix (National Library of Scotland copy). Its verse is the Davos Press cuts and rhymes, reproduced in facsimile, together with the two sets of lighthouse verses and the two Moral Tales. 23 poems were assigned from the witness on 2026-08-21. The 24th, A Martial Elegy for Some Lead Soldiers, was placed by hand the same day, because the witness shows it and the scorer could not: it scored 0.00, with no line matching at all. The page is a photographic facsimile of the hand-set Davos leaflet, and the OCR of it is wrecked rather than merely noisy — the heading comes out “Whrt-b/ E/*gy i'^r cd.ivt.lead 'Soldiem,” and the first line “Tor c<j'^//TSoJ(li€rs lately dead” — so no sampled line reaches core.line_hits' ratio and the score carries no information either way. What the witness does show, read through the damage at lines 3274-3294, is the whole poem: all eighteen lines stand in order, the volume's contents leaf lists “A Martial Elegy for some Lead Soldiers”, and the leaflet's own foot line “Price 1 penny, (1st Edition.)” closes the facsimile. The threshold was not lowered. Only membership is by hand; the order could not place the title either, for the same reason, so the poem keeps sequence null alongside the others the order could not locate. The order was re-derived on 2026-08-21 from the body alone, lines 262-4239, where it had been derived from the whole file. The contents leaf sits at lines 236-258 and was corrupting the derivation twice over: it carries the only readable occurrence of A Martial Elegy for some Lead Soldiers, so both passes agreed on that one line and ranked the poem ahead of everything in the body, and it made The Builder's Doom a passes-disagreed case. Excluding it drops the false rank and gains a real one, coverage 14 to 15.