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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying:
departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands
of time, Footprints which perhaps another - and I was the
other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my
conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was
rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the TALES OF A
TRAVELLER some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose
narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,
his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner
spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first
chapters - all were there, all were the property of
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