CHAPTER III

'To bed with backward looks,At my dear world of story books.'

'To bed with backward looks,

At my dear world of story books.'

As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous reader, and could, from his eighth year, pass happy hours with a book, any book so long as it did not mean lessons.

He was before very long a book-buyer as well as a book-lover, and he has for ever immortalised, in the charming pages ofA Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, that old bookshop (late J. L. Smith) at the corner of Leith Walk, where eager boys without coppers were but coldly received, but whence the fortunate capitalist could emerge, after having spent his Saturday pocket-money, the proud possessor of plays positively bristling with pirates and highwaymen. With these treasures he fled home in the gathering dusk, while 'Leerie-Light-the-Lamps' was kindling his cheery beacons along the streets, and, with pleasant terrors, devoured the weird productions, finally adding to their weirdness by the garish contents of a child's paint-box.

'A boy's will is the wind's will,And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'—Longfellow.

'A boy's will is the wind's will,And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'

'A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'

—Longfellow.

... 'Strange enchantments from the pastAnd memories of the friends of old,And strong tradition binding fastThe "flying terms" with bands of gold.'—Andrew Lang.

... 'Strange enchantments from the pastAnd memories of the friends of old,And strong tradition binding fastThe "flying terms" with bands of gold.'

... 'Strange enchantments from the past

And memories of the friends of old,

And strong tradition binding fast

The "flying terms" with bands of gold.'

—Andrew Lang.

The years 1861 and 1862 found Louis, with his childhood left behind him, a boy among other boys who sat on the forms and who played in the yards of the Academy, at which, during the greater part of the present century, many of the sons of Edinburgh men, and indeed of Scotsmen everywhere at home and abroad, have received their education.

From 1864 to 1867 he was principally at a Mr Thompson's school in Frederick Street, and he studied from time to time with private tutors at the different places to which his parents went for the benefit of their own health or his. These rather uncommon educational experiences were of far more value to him in after life than a steady attendance at any one school, as they made him an excellent linguist and gave him, from veryyouthful years, a wide knowledge of foreign life and foreign manners. In 1862 the Stevenson family visited Holland and Germany, in 1863 they were in Italy, in 1864 in the Riviera, and at Torquay for some months during the winter of 1865 and 1866; but after 1867 the family life became more settled and was chiefly passed between Edinburgh and Swanston.

In those days Louis was a lean, slim lad, inclined to be tall, and with soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to deepen and change with every passing impression of his quick working brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his father's powerful physiognomy.

He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true, voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable classical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was an historical student after a fashion of his own, dipping deep into such books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited form, and resolved itself into locating correctly the places and abodes sacred to the characters in his favourite books.

In the delightful dedication ofCatriona,—to Mr Charles Baxter, W.S., Edinburgh, who was his life-longfriend—he describes those pilgrimages charmingly, and one can, in imagination, see the eager lads wandering in search of famous 'streets and numbered houses,' made historic for them by some such magic pen as that which has for ever made sacred theOld Tolboothor theHeart of Midlothian, from the coblestones of which, in the pavement of St Giles and near the Parliament House, one reverently steps aside lest careless feet should touch that memento of the past. One can picture too as he himself does, the romantic boys of to-day following the wanderings of David Balfour by Broughton and Silver-mills, the Water of Leith, the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, and the wind-swept shores of the Forth. But one can still more clearly see that slim, brown-eyed youth—a-quiver with the eagerness that was so conspicuous a characteristic of his,—as in these very places he remembered bygone tales and even then formed plans for, and saw visions of, his own stories yet to be.

One can think of him with his eyes shining, and his face luminous, as he held forth to some choice friend, of sympathetic soul, on all these things of which his heart and brain were so full. One knows that when his walks were solitary his time was already put to a good account, and that the note-books which even then he carried in his pocket were in constant requisition.

The boy, from the very first, felt a strong leading to the profession of letters, which he ultimately followed; and he describes himself as from very early boyhood having been given to make notes for possible romances, and to choose words of peculiar fitness for the purpose he had in hand, as well as to weave tales of thrilling adventure.

Style was from the first a passion with him; and the lad had already begun in these juvenile note-books that careful choice of words and language which was at the very outset of his literary career to make so competent a critic as Mr Hamerton call him one of the greatest living masters of English prose. That he became something of a master in verse also those few thin volumes of deep thoughts, in a setting of fitly chosen words and rhymes, which he has published, amply prove.

To return, however, to the boy who went to the Academy, or rather who didnotgo to the Academy, for he had a faculty for playing truant which must have been extraordinarily provoking to parents and masters. No sooner was he out of the door in the morning than he could truly say—

'I heard the winds, with unseen feet,Pass up the long and weary street,'They say "We come from hill and glenTo touch the brows of toiling men."'That each may know and feel we bringThe faint first breathings of the spring.'

'I heard the winds, with unseen feet,Pass up the long and weary street,

'I heard the winds, with unseen feet,

Pass up the long and weary street,

'They say "We come from hill and glenTo touch the brows of toiling men."

'They say "We come from hill and glen

To touch the brows of toiling men."

'That each may know and feel we bringThe faint first breathings of the spring.'

'That each may know and feel we bring

The faint first breathings of the spring.'

And the voice of the spring thus calling him as soon as it was heard, was obeyed; and, careless of the frowns that were bound to greet his return, he was off to wander on his beloved Braids and Pentlands, to lie long days among the whin and the broom, or to slip away to watch the busy shipping on the Forth, and to think deep thoughts beside the wave-washed shore of that sea which ever drew him like the voice of a familiar friend.

To that intense love of Nature, and of Nature'ssolitude, his readers owe much, and we to-day may all say with the writer who gave such an interesting description of Swanston inGood Wordsin the spring of 1895, that those truant hours of his educated him for his future work far better than a careful attendance at school and college could have done. The same writer says that it was this open air life that he loved so dearly which gave to Stevenson's books their large leisure, and to his style its dignity. There is much truth in the remark; but as far as the style is concerned it is the product of time and thought, and it was most carefully and diligently formed by labour so earnest and painstaking, that few authors can even conceive of it.

InMemories and PortraitsMr Stevenson gives a delightful account of boyish days at a seaside resort, that is evidently North Berwick, and lovingly describes adventures with bull's-eye lanterns; adventures which seem to be intimately associated with the young folk of his connection, and which repeated themselves a few years later on the other side of the Forth, where boys and girls recalled the doings of Robert Louis and his friends with bull's-eye lanterns and gunpowder, in that cheerful form known to Louis Stevenson as a 'peeoy,' and considered it a point of honour to do likewise, no matter how indignant such mischief made the authorities. As for him, he was always the inventor and prime mover in every mischievous escapade the heart of youth could glory in.

The wind-swept coast about North Berwick had a strong fascination for him, and in several of his books we feel the salt breeze blowing in from the sea, across the bents, and hear the sea birds crying on the lonely shore. The autumnholidays were a great joy to him, and another epoch-making event must have been the taking of Swanston Cottage, in May 1867, to be the summer home of the Stevensons.

The boy took intense pleasure in his rambles about the hills, in his dreamy rests on 'Kirk Yetton'[2]and 'Allermuir,' and in his wanderings with John Todd, the shepherd, after that worthy had ceased, as he comically puts it, to hunt him off as a dangerous sheep-scarer, and so to play 'Claverhouse to his Covenanter'! The two soon became great friends, and many a bit of strange philosophy, many a wild tale of bygone droving days the lad heard from the old man. Another great friend of early Swanston years was Robert Young, the gardener, whose austere and Puritan views of life were solemnly shared with his young master.

Existence at Swanston was even more provocative of truant-playing than it had been in Edinburgh, and Louis, in his later school days and his early sessions at the University, was more than ever conspicuous by his absence from classes, more lovingly wedded to long hours among the hills, long rambles about the 'Old Town,' the Figgate Whins, the port of Leith, and the rapidly changing localities round Leith Walk, somewhat back from which, Pilrig, the ancient home of his ancestors, still stands gravely retired from the work-a-day world.

In the year 1867 he went with his father to the 'Dhu Heartach' Lighthouse, and so began to develop that passion for the Western Isles and the Western seas which future voyages inThe Pharoswere to bring tothe state of fervour and perfection which gave birth ofThe Merrymen, and to those descriptions of the wild and lovely scenery of Appin and the West Highlands, in which David Balfour and Alan Breck wander through the pages ofKidnapped.

It was his father's intention that he should follow the family profession of engineering, and with this in view he went to the Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1868. The professors in those days included Professors Kelland, Tait, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin, Blackie, Masson, and many others whose names are still remembered as 'a sweet-smelling savour' in that Edinburgh which they and the truant student, who honoured his class attendance 'more in the breach than the observance,' loved so well.

It was a stirring time at the University, and the students who warred manfully against the innovation of Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and the pioneers of the Lady Doctors' movement, were, it would seem on looking back, scarcely so mildly mannered, so peacefully inclined as those who now sit placidly beside 'the sweet girl graduates' of our day, on the class-room benches, and acknowledge the reign of the lady doctor as an accomplished fact. A torchlight procession of modern times is apparently a cheerful and picturesque function, smiled on by the authorities, and welcomed as a rather unique means of doing honour to a new Lord Rector or some famous guest of the city or the University. In Mr Stevenson's time, a torchlight procession had all the joys of 'forbidden fruit' to the merry lads who braved the police and the professors for the pleasure of marchingthrough the streets to the final bonfire on the Calton Hill, from the scrimmage round which they emerged with clothes well oiled and singed, and faces and hands as black as much besmearing could make them; while anxious friends at home trembled lest a night in the police cells should be the reward of the ringleaders.

Of one such procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as somethingvery precious! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, theEpicstill graces myEvery Day Book, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, one sees again those bygone days in which the slim figure and eager face of Louis Stevenson are always so conspicuous in every memory of the old, grey city of his birth.

The following lines from the clever skit give a really excellent picture of the college life in his day.

... 'A deputation weSent hither by the students to demandThat they—that is the students—in a bandMay march, illumed by torches flaring bright,Along the leading streets on Friday night.Brave was the Provost, yet towards his heartThe glowing life blood thrilled with sudden start;Well might he tremble at the name he heard,The Students! Kings might tremble at the word!He thought of all the terrors of the past,Of that fell row in Blackie's, April last—Of Simpson wight, and Stirling-Maxwell too,Of Miss Jex-Blake and all her lovely crew—He thought, "If thus these desperadoes dareTo act with ladies, learned, young and fair,Old women, like the Councillors and me,To direr torments still reserved may be.The better part of valour is discretion,I'll try to soften them by prompt concession."Then coughing thrice, impression due to makeAnd clear his throat, in accents mild he spake,"Ye have my leave, 'V.R.,' I mean 'D.V.'"The students bowed, retired, and he was free.'

... 'A deputation we

Sent hither by the students to demand

That they—that is the students—in a band

May march, illumed by torches flaring bright,

Along the leading streets on Friday night.

Brave was the Provost, yet towards his heart

The glowing life blood thrilled with sudden start;

Well might he tremble at the name he heard,

The Students! Kings might tremble at the word!

He thought of all the terrors of the past,

Of that fell row in Blackie's, April last—

Of Simpson wight, and Stirling-Maxwell too,

Of Miss Jex-Blake and all her lovely crew—

He thought, "If thus these desperadoes dare

To act with ladies, learned, young and fair,

Old women, like the Councillors and me,

To direr torments still reserved may be.

The better part of valour is discretion,

I'll try to soften them by prompt concession."

Then coughing thrice, impression due to make

And clear his throat, in accents mild he spake,

"Ye have my leave, 'V.R.,' I mean 'D.V.'"

The students bowed, retired, and he was free.'

The High Sheriff and the Chief of Police, when they heard of the Provost's weakness, were filled with wrath and dismay, and very promptly insisted on his lordship taking back the concession, so that this historic procession was as much 'forbidden fruit' as its predecessors, and the students probably enjoyed it the more that they had as usual to dare all those in authority to carry it out.

Another old-time enjoyment of that date was a snowball fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a reallygreatsnowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were Homeric combats, and a source of keen enjoyment to Robert Louis Stevenson, a very funny account of whom, on one of these occasions, was given me at the time by his cousin, Lewis Balfour, from Leven, himself a jovial medical student enjoying an active part in the melée. On the occasion of a great battle in the winter of 1869—or 1870—Mr Stevenson and one or two men, now well known in various professions, had seated themselves on a ledge in the quadrangle to watch the fight. From this vantage ground they encouraged the combatants, but took no active part in the fray. Within swarmed the students armed with snowballs, without, thelads of the town, equally active, stormed the gates. All were too intent on the battle to notice the advent of the police, who rushed into the college quadrangle and made prisoners where they could. Craning his neck too much, in his keen enjoyment, Mr Stevenson overbalanced himself, slipped from his perch and was promptly captured by 'a bobby,' and, in spite of gallant efforts for his rescue, was ignominiously marched off to the Police Office at the very moment that his blandly unconscious mother was driving up the Bridges. It was useless for his attendant friends to assert that he had been a non-combatant. Was he not taken in the very thick of the fight? The police had him and they meant to keep him for he could not produce sufficient bail from his somewhat empty pockets. His cousin and his friends, by leaving all their stray coins, their watches and other valuables, managed to secure his release so that he had not the experience—which it is possible he might have enjoyed—of passing a night in the police cells of his native city.

In his introduction to theMemoirs of Professor Fleeming-Jenkin, he himself tells a good story of his relations with that Professor, who was always a true and appreciative friend to his clever if idle student. He had handed in so few cards at the class of Engineering that his certificate was not forthcoming until he told his friend that his father would be very vexed if he could not produce the certificate—which he never intended touse—whereat the tender-hearted Professor handed it to him.

Another prime favourite of his among the Professors was Professor Kelland; and one can well understand the attraction which the dainty, gentle refinement of that mostkind-hearted of men had for a nature so akin to it as young Stevenson's. All Professor Kelland's students loved him; this one understood him also. Professor Masson was one of the giants of those days whom he was also most capable of appreciating, and whose lectures he occasionally attended although not a member of his class; and, himself not without his amiable eccentricities, he could not fail to have a soft spot in his heart for the quaint humour and the pleasant eccentricity which endeared Professor Blackie to his class and to the public. He was a poor attender at the Greek Class, however, and when he presented himself for his certificate the keen blue eyes of the Professor looked at him critically, and the Professor's remark was that he had been so seldom present at lectures it was hardly possible to recognise his face!

Many of the students of that day have taken a good place in the world; some of them have long ere now left the things of time behind them; one or two of them Mr Stevenson has pictured in his graphic pages. Several of them regarded him as an interesting personality, but very few of them suspected that he was 'the chiel amang them takin' notes' for future work that would bring world-wide fame, not only to himself, but to his University and to the city of his birth.

On the 2nd March 1869 he was proposed by George Melville, Esq., Advocate, as a member of the Speculative Society, and we know fromMemories and Portraitshow much he appreciated his membership of that Society, which has in its day included in the roll, on which his name stood No. 992, most of the men whose names arehonoured in Scotland's capital, and many of whom the fame and the memory are revered in far places of the earth. That he might smoke in the hall of the Speculative, in the very stronghold of University authority, he playfully professes to have been his chief pleasure in the thing; but other men, to whom his earnest face, his eagerness in debate, made one of the pleasures of its meetings, tell another story, and it was commonly said in those days that there would always be something of interest in hand if Stevenson took a part in it.

When he forsook the profession of engineering, Mr Stevenson attended the Law classes at the University, with the intention of being called to the Bar, but it is not on record that he was a more exemplary student of law than he had been of engineering, and he still found more satisfaction in his truant rambles and his meditations in old graveyards than he did in the legitimate study of his profession.

FOOTNOTE:[2]Cairketton is the form used in the Ordnance Survey.

[2]Cairketton is the form used in the Ordnance Survey.

'Blessed are his parents in a son, so graced in face and figureAnd of mind so wise.'—Lord Derby's Translation ofThe Iliad.

'Blessed are his parents in a son, so graced in face and figureAnd of mind so wise.'

'Blessed are his parents in a son, so graced in face and figure

And of mind so wise.'

—Lord Derby's Translation ofThe Iliad.

That was one of the quotations by which in those days we were wont to describe Mr Stevenson. Strictly speaking, perhaps he was not a handsome man. He was too slim, too ethereal, if one may use the term, to attain to anything sufficiently commonplace to be described as merely handsome. But he was indeed 'graced in face and figure,' for he possessed that rare attributedistinction, and his face, with its wonderfully luminous eyes, its ever changing expression, had a beauty peculiar to itself, and one which harmonised perfectly with the quaint wisdom of his mind.

That wisdom was so deep, yet so whimsical, so peculiar and so many-sided that one can only apply to its possessor another quotation half indignantly thrown at him, when he was too successful in argument, by an acquaintance of his, whose quick wit had a great charm for him.

'We gaze and still the wonder growsThat one small head can carry all he knows.'

'We gaze and still the wonder grows

That one small head can carry all he knows.'

He bowed to the compliment, he demurred as to the smallness of his head, and he enjoyed the quotationimmensely. With the same opponent he once tried a competition in verse-making. Both showed considerable skill, but the umpire decided that Louis had won, so he bore off in triumph the prize of a bottle of olives, and was only sorry that he could not compel the loser to share his feast, which he well knew would be as abhorrent to her as it was delightful to him.

With Edinburgh, wind-swept and grey, with its biting breeze, its swirling dust of March, there will always be associated in my mind certain memories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and of that happy home of the Stevenson family, 17 Heriot Row. In summer sunshine Swanston, lying cosily at the foot of the Pentlands, claimed them year by year, but every winter found them, for business or pleasure, established in that most homelike house, the windows of which, to the front, looked into the Heriot Row gardens, and at the back, from that upper flat where was the book-lined study of the son of the house, snatched a glimpse, over roofs and chimney cans, of the gold-fringed shores of Fife.

Across the blue Forth in Fife, at the little seaside town of Leven, well known to golfing fame, there had settled in 1866 an uncle of R. L. Stevenson, Dr John Balfour, who was noted for his gallantry and skill throughout the Indian Mutiny, and in more than one outbreak of cholera in India and at home. Of the town and the man Mr Stevenson gives a graphic picture inRandom Memories, when describing a visit to the Fife coast, where his father was making an inspection of lights and harbours.

In 1849 when home on leave Dr Balfour volunteered to go to Davidson's Mains, in the parish of Cramond,where as a specialist in cholera symptoms he was amazed to find the outbreak as virulent and as fatal as the Asiatic cholera he had seen in India. In 1866, when another wave of cholera swept over Britain, he was asked to go to Slateford, where he coped with its ravages almost single-handed, saving life in every case after he went, except those already too far gone before his arrival. In late autumn of the same year the scourge broke out seriously in the small towns on the coast of Fife, and Dr Balfour went to Leven, where the doctor had just died of it, and a state of panic prevailed, and there too he succeeded in quickly stamping it out.

Having retired from his Indian appointment he felt idle time hang heavy on hand, so he acceded to the request of the inhabitants and went to Leven to take up practice there. His wife, who was a cousin of his own, and their four children, shortly after followed him from Edinburgh, and he built a house called 'The Turret' there, where he remained until his greatly lamented death in 1887.

There from childhood I grew up in intimate friendship with the young Balfours, and went out and in to the doctor's house, receiving in it such kindness from parents and children that it was regarded by me as a second home, and its inmates were looked upon as one's 'ain folk.' As one's 'ain folk,' too, by-and-bye, were regarded those other Balfour families, notably Dr George W. Balfour's household and Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who had their home with her—who made of the little Fife town their holiday resort. Lateran Edinburgh school and long visits to Edinburgh relatives made the Scotch capital as familiar to me as Fife; and then the Stevenson family in their home at Heriot Row were added to the little circle of friends, now, alas! so thinned by grievous blanks. Old and young have passed into 'The Silent Land,' and life is infinitely the poorer for those severed friendships—those lost regards of early days.

Not a few of the old folk were notable in their time, some of the younger generation have made, or mean to make, some stir in the world. But round none of them gathers so much of romance of honour and of distinction as about Robert Louis Stevenson, who used to visit his uncle's house in Leven, doubtless from one of those expeditions to Anstruther, of which he tells us that he spent his time by day in giving a perfunctory attention to the harbour, at which his father's firm were working, and lived his real life by night scribbling romances in his lodgings. It is on record that he felt a thrill of well-merited pride when an Anstruther small boy pointed to him, as he stood beside the workmen, and said: 'There's the man that's takin' charge.' But he assuredly knew more of pleasure in his hours of scribbling than in his hours of inspection, although the out-of-door, wind-swept, wave-splashed part of engineering was never so abhorrent to him as office work. In the office he was known very little; but tradition has it that a small pile of evil spellings is still treasured there as a characteristic memento of the genius, and the thought has been known to comfort the sad hearts of other apprentice engineers afflicted with a like shakiness in their orthography, thatthe now much appreciated man of letters once shared their melancholy failing.

Stories of all sorts were handed about in our little clique of the wondrous Robert Louis whose sayings and doings were already precious to an appreciative circle of relatives and friends. But it was not till sometime in the autumn of 1869 that he first became personally known to me.

The introduction took place on a September afternoon in the drawing-room of 'The Turret,' and he inspired a great deal of awe in a youthful admirer who even then had literary aspirations, and who therefore looked up to him with much respect as someone who already wrote. From that time he was regarded as one of the quaintest, the most original and the most charming personalities among one's acquaintances. There was about him, in those days, a whimsical affectation, a touch of purely delightful vanity that never wholly left him in later life, and that far from repelling, as it would have done in any one more commonplace, was so intrinsically a part of his artistic nature that it was rather attractive than otherwise. Full of delightful humour, his idlest sayings—when he took the trouble to say anything which he frequently did not!—were teeming with the elements not only of laughter but of thought, and you wondered, long after you had talked with him, why it was that you saw new lights on things, and found food for mirth and matter for reflection where neither had suggested itself before.

In those days he was not only original himself, but he had to a great degree that rare faculty of bringing to the surface in others the very smallest spark of originality,and of remembering it and appreciating it in a way that was stimulating and helpful to those who had the pleasure of knowing him. When the little seaside town was empty of visitors, and it was not time to pay Edinburgh visits for the season, in February and March, one kindness of his was very greatly prized by some of us who beguiled the tedium of the winter months by writing for and conducting an amateur magazine, calledOurs. For this, in 1872 and 1873, Mr Stevenson gave us a short contribution,The Nun of Aberhuern, a trifle in his own graceful style, which, as he was even then beginning to be known in the world of letters, we valued much. Moreover, he took a friendly interest in the sheets of blue MS. paper so closely written over with our somewhat juvenile productions, and made here a criticism, there a prediction, which has not been without its effect on the future work of some of us.

Mr Stevenson was always kind and always sympathetic; he laughed at your follies of course, but he did it so pleasantly that the laughter seemed almost a compliment, and the kindness was more memorable than the mirth. In one among his juniors at least, imbued like himself with a love of old-time romance and of ancient story, he inspired a passion of gratitude that abides to this day. Mr Stevenson not only never laughed, as the other boys and girls did, nor treated the memory of delightful childish plays with contempt, as was the fashion of the generation just grown up, he never even smiled over the unfeminine tastes of a child who went pirate-hunting in an upturned table with a towel for a sail and dried orange skins for provender—or whose dolls were not treated as those dainty girlish playthingsought to be, as pretty babies and gay society dames, but figured as the tattered and battered followers of Prince Charlie—himself a hero very much the worse for the wear in a plaid and a kilt!—after Culloden. Or, in gayer moods, the same dolls attended his receptions at Holyrood in garish garments, or masqueraded as Mary Queen of Scots and her four Maries in that 'turret chamber high of ancient Holyrood' where 'she summoned Rizzio with his lute and bade the minstrel play.'

Mr Stevenson listened gravely to all these things. He professed a real interest in them. He even remembered the names of the puppets and the parts they had played, and so gained for himself an enduring niche in the heart that had bitterly resented the mockery of the others. It is quite possible that a nature so gentle and so appreciative as his reallyfeltthe sympathy. The juniors are rarely mistaken as to the genuineness of the feelings of their elders, and his interest certainly rang true to the youthful mind. He had been himself a delicate child, so he was capable of understanding how many weary and solitary hours the romantic plays had filled pleasantly.

It is not a memory of much moment, perhaps, but it shows that even at an age when most young men are too keenly concerned with themselves and their own affairs to take much trouble for those who are a few years their juniors, Mr Stevenson had thought and sympathy to spare for the small joys and sorrows, the interests, and the 'make-believes' that had amused a lonely child, and which, after all, in one form or another, make up a good deal of life to most of us.

One is inclined to gather from his books, and from thestatements accredited to him in magazines and newspapers, that he never took women very seriously. He may not have done so—save those who were very near and dear to him, and they were set in a sacred shrine of their own—but he certainly always treated women very charmingly; and the young girl relatives and friends, who were accustomed to be much in his home circle, had never any reason to complain of the lack of the most dainty and courtly attentions or of a most constant and spontaneous kindness from the somewhat solemn youth, who, like other youths of twenty, considered that it showed a great knowledge of the world to affect a rather cynical disdain of the feminine half of humanity. In himself there was, curiously enough, always a reminder of the feminine; an almost girlish look passed now and again, in those days, over the thin delicately-tinted face, and a womanly gentleness in voice and manner reminded one of his mother.

The same ready sympathy, the same power, as it were, of putting himself into a friend's place and entering with heart and soul into the affairs of others which made him so interested a listener to a young girl's story of her childhood's plays, made him in his later years the friend of the Samoans, the champion of Samoan liberties, and, all through his life, the one man whom the men and women who knew him loved with the love that is only given to the very few, and those the few, too often, whose death in life's prime, or before it, prove them to have been among those whom the old poet tells us 'the gods love.'

Nothing at this time was more remarkable in MrStevenson than his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men affect to be blasé and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and, above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that came in his way.

A comical instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in 'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique, and some whom age and sex ought perhaps to have taught to despise, though it had not, the hoydenish pleasures of 'a sea-house.' A 'sea-house,' for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a deep hole dug in the sand while the tide is out, and the sand taken from the hole is built round in broad, high walls to make the fort resist as long as possible the rush of the incoming waves. It takes hours to make, but no trouble is too great, for is there not the fierce joy of adventure at the last when the waves finally win in the struggle and the huddled-together inmates of the now submerged house are thoroughly soaked with spray and salt water?

The 'sea-house,' the shouts of its builders, the tempting curl on the waves, as each one came a little further, the slight rise of the wind driving the breakers hurriedly landwards, were evidently too much for Mr Stevenson.One moment the weight of his nineteen years and the duty of politeness to his aunt restrained him, the next Mrs Balfour was left standing alone, and overcome with laughter, while Louis was in the sea house scolding, praising, and exhorting all at once, but above all imploring us to 'sit it out a little longer' as wave after wave widened the breach in the ramparts of sand, and

'In every hole the sea came up,Till it could come no more,'

'In every hole the sea came up,

Till it could come no more,'

while wetter and wetter grew the heroic few who, with Mr Stevenson 'sat it out' loyally, till it was possible to sit there no longer. Then wet—wetter indeed than ever before—the remnant crept home to be frowned upon and punished but to know no repentance; for had not Robert Louis been the ringleader, and was there any punishment invented that could take from the joy and the pride of a mischievous adventure in whichhehad had a part! And he, with the water dripping from his trousers and 'squirching' in his boots, was perfectly and placidly happy, regardless of his aunt's dismay and the future horrors of a possible bad cold. He had been a schoolboy again for the all too brief half hour beside the grey and gurly sea, and that youthfulness, that survived through all the patient suffering of his life and that seems to laugh out of the pages of his books to the last, was in the ascendant as he walked off jauntily townwards, amiably oblivious of the lecture his aunt gave him by the way.

Anything which brought him into close contact with the sea had a charm for him, even that mock combat with the waves of the autumn equinox on the flat shoreof Fife. Therefore at this time although classes and study were a weariness to him his days spent in the old-fashioned town of Anstruther, or on the desolate coast of Caithness, had many pleasures; had many romances also, for everywhere he went he picked up odd and out-of-the-way knowledge, and came across strange stories and stranger characters, from the lingering tradition of the poor relic of the Spanish Armada, the Duke of Modena Sidonia,[3]who after his sojourn in Fair Isle landed at Anstruther and still glorified the quaint sea-port in the East Neuk with his ghostly dignity—to the peer of the realm, in actual flesh and blood, whom Mr Stevenson found acting as a home missionary to the present day population of the Fair Isle. All things were treasured in the note-book of his memory, or jotted down in the note-book in his pocket; and, while the engineer progressed very little in his profession, the future novelist was undergoing a training for his work almost perfect in its way and assuredly most admirably suited to the nature that loved an open air life and revelled in an existence on the sea or beside it.'

Possibly not all aspiring civil engineers, certainly very few budding novelists, so test the reality of things as to go down into the ocean depths in a diver's dress and in the company of a professional diver, but this Robert Louis Stevenson actually did. His account of it, in bygone days, was gruesomely graphic, his pen-and-ink sketch of it, to be read inRandom Memories, is notless so; and the thing itself must have been an experience well worth having to a mind like his. Well worth knowing too, both to the man and to the future creator of character, were those brave hardy sons of toil who did the rough work of his firm's harbours and lighthouses; and many a good yarn he must have heard them spin as he stood side by side with them on some solid block of granite, or on some outlying headland, or chatted and smoked with the captain and the sailors ofThe Pharosas she made her rounds among the islands.

FOOTNOTE:[3]Although Mr Stevenson spoke and wrote of this personage as 'the Duke of Modena Sidonia,' he was in reality Don Jan Gomez de Modena, who is mentioned in T. M'Crie's 'Life of Andrew Melville.'

[3]Although Mr Stevenson spoke and wrote of this personage as 'the Duke of Modena Sidonia,' he was in reality Don Jan Gomez de Modena, who is mentioned in T. M'Crie's 'Life of Andrew Melville.'

'O, pleasant party round the fire.'—R. L. Stevenson.

'O, pleasant party round the fire.'

—R. L. Stevenson.

Often a little indifferent, sometimes politely bored in general society, it was at home that Robert Louis Stevenson seemed to me to be seen to the greatest advantage. That little household of three, that delightful trio who so thoroughly appreciated each other were charming everywhere, but only quite perfect when taken together within the hospitable walls that enshrined so true a home. Not a house or an abiding place merely, whence the business or the gaieties of life could be comfortably indulged in, but ahomewhere, however much the amusements of the Scotch capital were shared in and appreciated, the truest happiness lay around the quiet fireside where the mother, father, and son loved and understood each other with a love the deeper, that the intense Scotch reticence of all made it, like a hidden jewel, the more precious because so rarely displayed to strangers' eyes.

No son could be more fortunate in his parents, no parents could have given a child a more unselfish devotion, a more comprehending sympathy. His very delicacy andthe anxiety it had so often caused them had drawn their hearts more tenderly to him, and, absolutely happy in each other, they were equally happy in their pride and pleasure in their son's evident genius and most original personality.

In days when discontent and extravagance have done so much to lessen, at least upon the surface of things, the sacredness of home, and weaken the solemnity of marriage, it is comforting and pleasant to look back upon such a home as that was, and to realise that it is possible, in the midst of a busy life of work and of pleasure, to preserve an inner holy of holies around the domestic hearth, into which no jarring discord, no paltry worldly worry, can come, because love is there. Before love's clear gaze all that is selfish and petty and false dies away, while all that is true, good, and gentle makes for sweet peace and that perfect union of hearts which can alone create a true marriage and a perfect home life.

Into the Stevenson household, as into other households, came from time to time real worry, real grief, and not infrequent anxiety. The very frailty of tenure by which their son had always held his life was in itself a daily burden to the parents. Mrs Stevenson, especially in her earlier married life, was often far from strong; to Mr Stevenson came now and then those darker moods to which the Scotch temperament, particularly when tinged with the Celtic, is liable. Personal and business disappointments were not wholly unknown, although life in these latter respects was one saved at least from monetary anxieties, and crowned with a large measure of success. But in "all the changes and chances of this mortal life"this household had a sure sheet anchor on which to depend. Love met the trials smiling, and because they loved each other they were clothed in the armour of defence.

It was a home ennobled by a high ideal of what life ought to be, and hallowed by a strong and personal faith in God. Mr Stevenson's somewhat austere Calvinism gave a gravity to his character and his religion that were admirably balanced by the happy nature and the sunny active faith of his wife, whose religion was none the less real and earnest that it was bright and always cheerfully practical. Both loved the grand old Church of Scotland, with her far-reaching history and her noble traditions; both, with money and with personal interest, helped not only their own congregation of St Stephen's but the missions and schemes of the Church at large, and many private kindnesses and public charities besides evinced their liberality of heart. Mrs Stevenson, among other things, took a keen pleasure in work for the Indian Zenanas, and among his many engrossments Mr Stevenson was greatly occupied as to the public good of Edinburgh, and notably interested himself in the restoration of St Giles, that grand old landmark of national history of which, in its present condition, Scotland has every reason to be proud.

In such a home as this Robert Louis Stevenson was from early childhood educated in a deeply-rooted respect for the Bible and the old solemn teachings which gave to Scotland those 'graves of the martyrs,' of which he so often writes. The Calvinism of his ancestors, inherited to a certain extent by his father, softened to him by his mother's sweetness of nature and brightness of faith, alwaysremained with him something to be regarded with a tender reverence; and if, as he grew to manhood, the 'modern spirit' changed and modified his beliefs, so that it might be said of him, as of so many large natures and earnest souls,

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