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 nn **.< Cornell University Library 
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 R ° bmi* L ° UiS s,evenson ' s Edinburgh days 
 
 mill ll I lllll lllll I III inn mi i iiiiiiiimii iiiiiiii nun iii 
 3 1924 013 554 815 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013554815 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S 
 EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson's 
 Edinburgh Days as by 
 
 E. Blantyre Simpson author of 
 " Sir James Y. Simpson " j& a& 
 
 ' •■'i;M i i 
 •' 1 1: li i\ ir \ 
 
 Second 
 Edition 
 
 LONDON : HODDER AND 
 STOUGHTON * -* 27 
 PATERNOSTER ROW 1898 
 
 *\ 
 
*/•/«* 
 
 YlUIUVII'/H 
 
 Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. 
 
Contents 
 
 j,, _ PAGE 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 BIRTH AND PARENTAGE .... 3 
 
 Chapter II 
 
 THOMAS STEVENSON 27 
 
 Chapter III 
 
 MRS. STEVENSON 57 
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 ALISON CUNNINGHAM 87 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Chapter V 
 
 INFANT DAYS "7 
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 SCHOOLDAYS , .139 
 
 Chapter VII 
 
 SPRING EQUINOX 161 
 
 Chapter VIII 
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 197 
 
 Chapter IX 
 
 LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING . . 221 
 
CONTENTS vii 
 
 TAGE 
 
 Chapter X 
 
 LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 255 
 
 Chapter XI 
 
 TRAVEL SONGS ....... 289 
 
Birth and Parentage 
 
"The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotsman." 
 
 — Silverado Squatters. 
 
 " Here a boy he dwelt, through all the singing season, 
 And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came." 
 
 — Underwoods. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 Birth and Parentage 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, speaking 
 of the insignificant river which has carved 
 for itself a gorge through the west end of Edin- 
 burgh, credits this murky Water of Leith with 
 making music in his memory. Within a bow- 
 shot of it he first saw the light, on November 
 13th, 1850. 
 
 His birthplace, 8 Howard Place, is in an 
 unpretentious street, then one of the northern- 
 most outskirts of Edinburgh. In the middle of 
 the century there were, on this road to the 
 Forth, old country houses, whose ample parks 
 and pleasaunces made verdant spots amid the 
 grey encroaching town. Facing Louis's first 
 home, black against the sky-line, stands the 
 shaggy ridge of Corstorphine Hill. On that hill- 
 side he made Alan Breck and David Balfour part 
 
4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 company awhile, to meet again at Silvermills not 
 far from his birthplace. Buildings have shut out 
 this westerly outlook, and now Howard Place 
 is hemmed in on all sides, though the gimp 
 gardens in front of its two-storied modest houses, 
 as well as the big laburnums and plenteous lilacs, 
 tell by their free growth of greater space and 
 air in more rustic days. 
 
 Louis's home for the first seven winters of his 
 life was in that neighbourhood, and he had 
 a plentiful supply of such flowers and sunshine 
 as Edinburgh is endowed with, and breezes with 
 a whiff of the sea in them. Louis had an ever- 
 green freshness of memory. Cheerful recollections 
 of his hopeful, happy childhood were stamped 
 indelibly on his mind. 
 
 His first nurse was a widow, who in after 
 years read his books with great pride, though 
 she had not seen him since she left him a helpless 
 baby. She had a fancy for tales of a blood- 
 curdling description, and took special interest 
 in her foster-son's most gruesome stories, flatter- 
 ing herself he had imbibed the appetite for such 
 from her. 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 5 
 
 In the dawn of his days she took him for his 
 first taste of the outer air into the Botanic Gar- 
 dens, which are nearly opposite his birthplace. 
 Lying full to the sun, with sheltered paths, fenced 
 by walls and trees from the nipping sweep of 
 easterly winds, it was an inviting parade ground 
 for nurses and their tender charges. Louis, in 
 his Child Play, as if he had not forgotten these 
 immature days, speaks of the lazy interest which 
 children, wheeled along in perambulators and half 
 sunk in a species of pleasing stupor, evince in their 
 surroundings. 
 
 We can conjure up the image of the future 
 author at this stage, in a hat bulky with protective 
 ear-bows, absurdly chubby of cheek, with his dark 
 eyes alertly noting the things of colour and life 
 within his range, or contemplating other juveniles 
 with placid condescension, as in this wordless state 
 of existence they passed one another by with 
 exchange of infantine smiles. He also studied 
 the world from the windows of his home. The 
 students of botany, hurrying in the May morn- 
 ings to their lecture among the flowers, might 
 often have seen a small child held up to the 
 
6 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 window to gaze at the lads, who were almost 
 as early astir as the dust-carts. 
 
 When Louis was beginning to toddle on his 
 unstable legs and to talk in a language only his 
 parents understood, he had the good fortune to 
 have Alison Cunningham engaged as his nurse. 
 From the lucky day she crossed his path, he 
 may be. said to have had two mothers. The 
 task of guarding his health and harbouring his 
 feeble strength gave ample work to a couple of 
 capable women. Robert Louis Stevenson was 
 not like many eventually successful Scots, who 
 have had to fight their way upward from a 
 lowly rung on the ladder. He was born with 
 the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. An only 
 son, a treasured child, he had before him substan- 
 tial worldly prospects. He was reared in a home 
 where he was lapped in love. A poor lad has 
 often at least one advantage over a rich one, 
 for in the narrow sphere of a cottage he tastes 
 life nearest the bone, where it is sweetest, and has 
 the full benefit of his mother's watchful guardian- 
 ship without any intervening nursery. But young 
 Louis, when social duties kept Mrs. Stevenson 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 7 
 
 from him, ever had his "second mother" at his 
 beck and call. 
 
 When he grew big enough to take daily walks 
 abroad, a neighbour recollects watching him as 
 he was led along on the sunniest side of the 
 pavement, firmly gripping nurse's hand, his face 
 flanked with flannel, for he suffered continually 
 from earache. 
 
 A tender little plant he looked, despite the 
 plumpness of babyhood which still rounded his 
 cheeks. His daily walks did not extend very 
 far. He often peered through the gates of 
 Warriston, looking up at the square house stand- 
 ing pleasantly in its beech-fringed park. When he 
 grew old enough to digest grisly tales, he learned 
 how an Edinburgh tragedy had been enacted 
 there : how a wife hired a man to beat her husband 
 to death, and how she walked up and down the 
 long corridor looking out on the silver-stemmed 
 beeches till the cries of the wretched man were 
 stilled. 
 
 A pond in the Botanic Gardens, with a verdant 
 knoll rising out of it, was another pet place of 
 young Louis's; water and even a make-believe 
 
8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 island were early attractive to him. Adventur- 
 ous daisies pied the old turf there before their 
 due season, and the boy, ever fond of flowers, 
 used to pick these stunted pioneers, and with 
 the painfully short-stemmed posy, limp with 
 being pressed in his hot hands, he would hurry 
 home to his mother. " Cummy " had to lift him 
 up in her long-suffering arms every time they 
 crossed Canonmills Bridge, to look over the 
 parapet and watch the Water of Leith as it 
 swirled down in winter, a turbulent flood over- 
 flowing its channel, and hiding the grass under 
 its darkling, frothy waters. "Often and often 
 I desire to look upon it again," he says, — not from 
 this bridge, perhaps, but from a point some miles 
 further inland, where it ran, speckled with mill 
 foam, past his grandfather's manse. Beside this 
 drumlie river at Canonmills Bridge, there was 
 to be seen a garden, which flourished under the 
 lee of the protecting parapet. It was a reminder 
 of country days, a garden with strawberry plots 
 edged by a border of old-fashioned flowers, and 
 apple and pear trees blooming early in the 
 hollow. Young Louis could watch the first hints 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 9 
 
 of spring from his outlook on the bridge. When 
 he was at Samoa, it is recorded of him that 
 "his eyes were never at rest, nothing escaped 
 his notice — birds, flowers, or the tiny snow-white 
 clouds hanging high in the blue empyrean." So 
 when but a toddling bairn, holding to Cummy's 
 hand for support and guidance, his quick eyes 
 noted everything around him. 
 
 Louis Stevenson acquired, almost in infancy, a 
 fancy for mills, and close by his first Edinburgh 
 home stood some red-roofed, grey-walled mills, 
 where, some eight hundred years before, corn had 
 been ground for the canons of Holyrood. The 
 mill lades have long since been buried and turned 
 into town drains, and the quaint cottages with 
 the outside stairs that gathered around the 
 ancient mills with the red roofs will not see a 
 new century. 
 
 The history of his native town was of interest 
 to this slim son of hers even when he was small. 
 His kith and kin for generations had been citizens 
 of Auld Reekie. His grandsire's people had dwelt 
 within its old walls. His mother's connections, 
 the Balfours, owned Pilrig, on the main road that 
 
io R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 stretched from the city of his childhood to 
 the sea. Pilrig House stood then in its plea- 
 saunce, and Leith Walk was a country road. 
 Louis speaks of his grandfather racing up 
 the green avenue to Pilrig House, and as a 
 student marching up the Bridges " in trim 
 stockinged legs in that city of cocked hats and 
 good Scotch still unadulterated." Louis sent his 
 hero, David, to Pilrig to see his cousin, the Laird, 
 so he was related to his own creation. David 
 Balfour saw Pilrig House much as Robert Louis 
 Stevenson's grandfather, Lewis Balfour, knew it 
 in his young days, when corpses creaked in 
 chains on the Gallows Lee, between Pilrig and 
 Edinburgh. 
 
 It was at this grandfather's manse at Colinton 
 that Louis first learned, he says, to love mills. 
 " Had I an ancestor a miller ? " he asks, to ac- 
 count for this early developed taste, and he finds 
 a Stevenson who was a lessee of the Canonmills. 
 A Bailie Stevenson, who lived at the time of 
 the Restoration, and " the miller of Canonmills, 
 worthy man ! " were, he feared, really debarred 
 from his pedigree, and he complains, " I am re- 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE n 
 
 duced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters." 
 Whence through the trail of heredity he drew 
 some of his special gifts it is not hard to trace, 
 for he came of a shrewd and cultivated stock. 
 But his peculiarities in manner and appearance 
 cannot be accounted for by his forbears. He has 
 taken us with him in a Stevensonian genealogical 
 hunt, a hunt pursued at intervals of several years, 
 which he ultimately wove into the Records of a 
 Family of Engineers. He came to the conclusion 
 that " on the whole the Stevensons may be de- 
 scribed as decent, reputable folk, following honest 
 trades — millers, maltsters, and doctors — playing 
 the character parts in the Waverley Novels with 
 propriety if without distinction, and to an orphan 
 looking about him in the world for a potential 
 ancestry offering a plain and quite unadorned 
 refuge equally free from shame and glory." 
 
 His direct paternal kinsmen, who bore succes- 
 sively the name of Robert, sprang, in 1675, from 
 one James Stevenson, of Nether Carsewell, maltster, 
 in the then clean and handsome city on the Clyde. 
 Louis's grandfather was the third Robert in this 
 line. He had been early left an orphan, his 
 
i2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 young father, Alan Stevenson, and Alan's brother, 
 Hugh, having died in the West Indies, whither they 
 had gone in pursuit of an unjust steward. Alan's 
 widow married a second time, a widower, Thomas 
 Smith, who carried on a trade in oil, and brought 
 into the Stevenson blood a love of lamps, a love 
 a future Stevenson who "stayed at home and 
 played with paper like a child" fully inherited. 
 " I will say it fairly," he writes, " it grows on me 
 with every year ; there are no stars so lovely as 
 Edinburgh street lamps. When I forget thee, 
 Auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cun- 
 ning" 
 
 Thomas Smith, who was an enterprising man, 
 began to trade with the Northern Lights Com- 
 missioners, and he brought to their notice the 
 advantages of oil lamps and reflectors as com- 
 pared with the open fires of coals. He had a 
 daughter by his previous marriage. His step- 
 son, young Robert Stevenson, fixed on this semi- 
 sister as his helpmeet, and found in her a piously 
 inclined douce wife. From among the many 
 children she bore him but three of the sons sur- 
 vived, the future builders of harbours and those 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 13 
 
 great pharoses which form round our coasts a 
 chain of brilliant, helpful Northern Lights. 
 
 There can be no doubt whence Louis imbibed 
 his love of adventure and of the sea. Ships bulk 
 largely in Tusitala's tales. A ship very appro- 
 priately appeared on his monument at San Fran- 
 cisco, a fine old-world galley of the build those 
 Vikings used in their sea-raidings. There hung 
 in the house of Louis's boyish great-grandfather, 
 Alan Stevenson, " and," he says, " successively in 
 those of my grandfather and father, an oil paint- 
 ing of a ship of many tons burthen. The pic- 
 ture was preserved through years of hardship, 
 and remains to this day in the possession of the 
 family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire 
 Alan. It was on this ship that he sailed on his 
 last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by 
 Hugh." In his Memories Louis relates how a 
 frigate in a window took his eye, and " when upon 
 any Saturday we made a party to behold the 
 ships we passed that corner, and since in those 
 days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy 
 or daybreak, this of itself was enough to hallow 
 it." 
 
i 4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 If engineering in 1870 had been as much on 
 the rough as it was some eighty years before, 
 Thomas Stevenson would not have had any diffi- 
 culty in persuading his son to follow in the foot- 
 steps of his sires. Louis, speaking sympatheti- 
 cally, yet enviously, of the difficulties and dangers 
 his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, had to face 
 when trying to light our dark coasts, says : " It 
 must not be forgotten that these voyages in the 
 tender were the particular pleasure and reward 
 of his existence ; that he had in him a reserve of 
 romance which carried him delightedly over these 
 hardships and perils, that to him it was ' a great 
 gain ' to be eight nights and seven days in the 
 savage Bay of Levensurck — to read a book in the 
 much-agitated cabin, to go on deck and hear the 
 gale scream in his ears and see the landscape 
 dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two 
 anchors, and to turn in at night and wake again 
 at morning in his narrow berth to the clamorous 
 and continued voices of the gale." This near 
 relative bequeathed some of his characteristics 
 with a bountiful plenitude to his descendant, for 
 from him Louis inherited his " anxious exacti- 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 15 
 
 tude about details, an interesting flow of con- 
 versation, a taste for sea and adventure, and 
 lastly that reserve of romance'' Louis, remark- 
 ing on his grandfather's letters to his small sons, 
 says that besides all these he had "a fine scent 
 of all that was romantic to a boy." 
 
 From his mother's side Louis, like David 
 Balfour, came of the Balfours of Pilrig. His 
 grandfather was what he called " a herd of men." 
 In Memories and Portraits he gives us a well- 
 executed sketch of Mrs. Stevenson's old home, 
 and of her father, the Rev. Lewis Balfour, in his 
 manse at Colinton. The minister we see grey of 
 locks, handsome of feature, upright of carriage, 
 smacking his lips over a "barley-sugar kiss," a 
 sweetmeat administered to Louis as a reward after 
 a dose of medicine. Louis's last recollection of 
 his grandfather was of an old gentleman sternly 
 forbidding his daughter, Miss Balfour, to give a 
 lollipop to her expectant nephew, for the boy 
 had had no horrid gregory to swallow. From 
 the Balfours the author took his name, except 
 the Robert, which came to him from the Steven- 
 sons. His mother disliked the names Thomas 
 
1 6 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 and Robert, and wished the latter excluded. Mr. 
 Stevenson, however, had the old-fashioned belief 
 in a grandson bearing the name of his father's 
 father, though he said he might drop it for every- 
 day use. He promised his wife her boy would 
 be spoken of as Lewis, unless she had another 
 son, when, according to hereditary rule, she had 
 the naming of him after her father. Robert 
 Lewis Balfour our hero was baptized. Perhaps 
 he thought there was a superabundance of letters 
 in R. L. B. S. The Balfour soon dropped out of 
 his name, and early he became R. L. S., which 
 initials, says Mr. Barrie, " are, I suppose, the best 
 beloved in recent literature ; certainly they are the 
 sweetest to me." 
 
 He also, like his grandsire, started in life with 
 his name spelt Lewis. The story of the change 
 to Louis is remarkable. Mr. Stevenson was a 
 strong Conservative. Now in Robert Louis 
 Stevenson's youthful years there was a Radical 
 town councillor yclept Lewis. So strong was 
 Mr. Stevenson's aversion to the man that he 
 ordered that in future his son's name should be 
 spelt differently, even with a Frenchified turn in 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 17 
 
 it, for fear the two families should be thought 
 in any way connected. So the boy's patronymic 
 was in a manner severed from the minister of 
 Colinton, and his mother often regretted he had 
 dropped her father's honoured surname. Young 
 Robert Louis owns that he felt he had little in 
 common with the Rev. Dr. Lewis Balfour. 
 "Now," he writes, "I often wonder what I in- 
 herited from this old minister. Try as I please, 
 I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor ; 
 and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write 
 the phrase, he moves in my blood and whispers 
 words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot 
 and centre of my being." 
 
 Louis's mother was born in the old manse of 
 Colinton. " A large family," her boy says, '' of 
 stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and 
 reared, and came to man and womanhood in that 
 nest of little chambers, so that the face of the 
 earth was peppered with the children of the 
 manse, and letters with outlandish stamps became 
 familiar to the local postman. The dullest could 
 see this was a house that had a pair of hands in 
 divers foreign places." Though Balfours wandered 
 
 2 
 
18 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 afar over the globe, it was not so much love of 
 travel as the Scot's destiny which impelled them 
 to leave the crowded homeland and cross the seas 
 in search of work. The commanding presence 
 of the silvery-headed divine who shepherded his 
 human flocks at Colinton filled the eye and duly 
 impressed his small namesake. Louis regretted 
 no share of the Balfour fine looks had come his 
 way. The children of the old manse were a blue- 
 eyed race, shapely in feature and noble in carriage. 
 In 1863 Louis, in Random Memories, mentions that 
 at Leven there was still to be seen " the tall figure 
 and white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, 
 my uncle, Dr. Balfour, who was still walking his 
 hospital rounds, while the troopers from Meerut 
 clattered and cried ' Deen Deen ' along the streets 
 of the imperial city." Another Dr. Balfour, whom 
 Louis calls "that wise youth, my uncle," testifies 
 in Edinburgh to-day that the Balfours are a 
 strikingly good-looking race. Louis's mother was 
 a slim, active woman, and no one seeing her in 
 her latter years, with her erect figure and fresh 
 face, would have believed her the mother of a son 
 who had died aged forty-five. Mrs. Stevenson 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 19 
 
 was a cultured and clever woman. Luckily Louis 
 nherited her bright, vivacious disposition; but he 
 tells us the Balfours were unemotional, hating the 
 display of what they felt. Their descendant was 
 the reverse of this, and his original unconvention- 
 ality, his tropical temperament, and his foreign 
 appearance, cannot be traced to any of his pro- 
 genitors. Louis wrote most likely with a twinkle 
 of fun lighting up his Southern sunny eyes. " To 
 one more tradition I may allude, that we are 
 somehow descended from a French barber-sur- 
 geon who came to St. Andrews in the service 
 of one of the Cardinal Beatons. No details were 
 added. But the very name of France was so 
 detested in my family for three generations that 
 I am tempted to suppose there may be some- 
 thing in it." 
 
 There was another Stevenson, one of Louis's 
 cousins, who seemed to have a strong dash of 
 Bohemianism, though he too came of the same 
 orderly family of engineers. There can be no 
 doubt that it was from some Stevenson that they 
 acquired alien blood, for two of his descendants 
 rebelled against the prim decorum of the accepted 
 
2o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 codes of social life, and both refused a lucrative 
 and hereditary seat in the office their sires had 
 made, preferring the more precarious earnings by 
 pen and brush. The fact that the two bore the 
 same grandfather's name, and were in many 
 things so alike, make it clear that this gipsy strain 
 came from the father's side, though as far back as 
 the author of A Family of Engineers (feeling, he 
 says, as if he had his ancestors' souls in his charge 
 all the while) could fathom, the Stevensons, and 
 the wives they married, were an industrious, thrifty 
 set of quiet-going, reputable folk. 
 
 In a delightful genealogical glimpse, Louis, when 
 wandering over " our ancestral adventures which 
 are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy," to ac- 
 count for perverse caprices, harks back to " tree- 
 top memories like undeveloped negatives " lying 
 dormant in his mind. "And though, to-day, I 
 am only a man of letters," he goes on to say, 
 "either tradition errs, or I was present when 
 there landed at St. Andrews a French barber- 
 surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the 
 great Cardinal Beaton. I have shaken a spear in 
 the Debateable Land, and shouted the slogan of 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 21 
 
 the Elliots. I was present when a- skipper, ply- 
 ing from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France 
 after the '15. I was in a West India merchant's 
 office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie, 
 and managed the business of a plantation in St. 
 Kitts. I was with my engineer-grandfather (the 
 son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he 
 sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise 
 that gave us The Pirate and the Lord of the Isles ; 
 I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock in the fog, 
 when the Smeaton drifted from her moorings, 
 and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized 
 upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap 
 sea-water before his tongue could utter audible* 
 words ; and once more with him when the Bell 
 Rock beacon took a 'thrawe' and his workmen 
 fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he 
 sat unmoved reading in his Bible — or affecting to 
 read — till one after another slunk back with con- 
 fusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, 
 parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, 
 and sometimes met them well" This descendant 
 of these men, although wanting in physical 
 strength, certainly was endowed with their en- 
 
22 R. L. STEVENSON S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 durance and their pluck. Though frail of body, 
 he enjoyed in a manner a robustness of consti- 
 tution few have equalled, for he found "true 
 health is to be able to do without it." He was 
 denied strong lungs and limbs, and any palpable 
 immunity from sickness, yet he had a full measure 
 of lusty vigour, for he faced the ills of the flesh so 
 gallantly that, according to his own argument, he 
 was a Samson in strength. 
 
 We have seen whence he gleaned his mettle- 
 some bravery, but we know not which of the 
 many threads and fibres of his being can account 
 for his unique, unnational look, for never could 
 he persuade an official he was a Briton, much 
 less a Scotsman. He was, he complained, cast 
 into dungeons as a spy, arrested as a vagrant 
 pedlar, and looked at askance when he went to 
 cash cheques at strange banks, and his pass- 
 port was ever most suspiciously scrutinized. It 
 is curious, too, that the descendant of the gentle- 
 blooded Balfours and the even - going Steven- 
 sons had such "gangrel feet," which made him 
 long to wander like any genuine gipsy. His 
 whole being yearned for brilliance of colouring 
 
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE 23 
 
 and the sunshiny heat of the South. " There is 
 one of nature's spiritual ditties," he early wrote, 
 "that has not yet been set to words or human 
 music, ' The Invitation to the Road,' an air con- 
 tinually sounding in the ears of gipsies, and to 
 whose inspiration our nomadic fathers journeyed 
 all their days." 
 
 Louis was not given a musical ear along with 
 his poetic endowments, but this spiritual song he 
 could always appreciate, and he would not have 
 changed ears with those who cannot hear its 
 music. "What sleeper in green tree-tops, what 
 muncher of nuts concludes my pedigree ? " Robert 
 Louis Stevenson asks anxiously. It seems to us 
 some long dormant " tree-top instinct " awoke in 
 him and sent him away from us to settle amid 
 the gaudy, luxuriant richness of a South Sea isle. 
 Some unrecorded progenitor must have listened to 
 that nomadic spiritual ditty which gipsies hear so 
 readily and sing so invitingly, leading others with 
 them along the free and open road. For Louis 
 undisguisedly delighted to escape out of what 
 he called the Bastille of civilization, and become 
 " a mere kindly animal and a sheep of nature's 
 
24 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 flock," even though on his travels he found " the 
 globe, granite underfoot and strewn with cutting 
 flints." 
 
Thomas Stevenson 
 
" The life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains ; what we 
 have lost, what we now try to recall, is the friend and com- 
 panion." — Memories and Portraits. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Thomas Stevenson 
 
 'THHOUGH his pedigree does not shed much 
 ■*■ light on the origin of Louis' Southern looks, 
 his responsive, mobile manners, his special gifts, 
 we have more authentic acquaintance with those 
 to whom he owed his existence, those who guided 
 and guarded him in his youth, and gave a training 
 bend to his thoughts when he was but a green 
 twig. 
 
 It vexed Mrs. Stevenson in her latter years to 
 hear or see it stated that Louis and his father were 
 antagonistic, and had waged a bitter civil war. 
 People, she said, assumed that types of unhappy 
 youths such as Archie Weir and examples of re- 
 bellion against parental authority were drawn from 
 the author's own personal experience. There was, 
 it is true, a deal of diversity between Thomas 
 
 «7 
 
28 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Stevenson's nature and that of his only child, but 
 underlying the engineer's reserved decorum and 
 sombreness there were many points of resem- 
 blance and sympathy between father and son. No 
 one enjoyed Thomas Stevenson's talk more than 
 Louis, who says it was " compounded of so much 
 sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and 
 clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, 
 that it was a perpetual delight to all that knew 
 him. His use of language was both just and 
 picturesque. Love, anger, and indignation shone 
 through him and broke forth in imagery, like what 
 we read of in Southern races." Louis gloried in 
 his father's whimsical fancies, his " blended stern- 
 ness and softness that was wholly Scottish, and 
 at first somewhat bewildering ; with a profound 
 essential melancholy of disposition, and (what 
 often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality 
 in company." No one, I think, appreciated his 
 father's good qualities, his humour, his quips and 
 fads, even his dogged theological views, more than 
 the son who drew so just and masterly a portrait 
 of Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer. 
 "Smout" Mr. Stevenson rechristened his small 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 29 
 
 boy, a name he was long known by in his home 
 circle. Smout was simply worshipped by his two 
 mothers. On the brief days of winter, when his 
 mother and Cummy were partakers of a gorgeous 
 banquet, while he, the dispenser of the feast, sat in 
 a paper crown and presided over the mimic tea-set 
 (which still lives on Cummy's table), the small 
 boy, hearing the gate click, and his father's key in 
 the latch, would fly downstairs to greet the master 
 of the house and invite him to the " party." No 
 caressing and adoration that had been lavished 
 upon this sole monarch of the nursery was half so 
 appreciated by his majesty as the kindly glance 
 he saw beam on him from out of his father's deep- 
 set eyes, and the strong hand held out to him, and 
 the grave, interrogative greeting, " Well, Smout ? " 
 The open-hearted, manifestly affectionate boy 
 quite understood his apparently undemonstrative 
 father; and though they bickered in words when 
 the son grew up, and argued and discussed with 
 much warmth, a good fellowship always existed 
 between them. Louis always warred in words 
 with his friends, and neither filial affection nor fear 
 of his father's displeasure ever rendered him dumb 
 
3 o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 or submissive. The two fought many a duel 
 which, to outsiders, seemed irreverent rebellion on 
 the son's part, but the father liked his boy's fear- 
 less thrusts. He could, truly, from his heart, dedi- 
 cate a volume "in love and gratitude" to the father 
 "by whose devices the great sea-lights in every 
 quarter of the world now shine more brightly." 
 
 Mr. Stevenson came of a large family, of which 
 only five survived. They were mown down by 
 the harvester Death two or three at a time. 
 Thomas Stevenson's mother, her grandson says, 
 was " a devout, unambitious woman, occupied with 
 her Bible, her children, and her house ; easily 
 shocked, and associating largely with a clique of 
 godly parasites." She seemed strongly tinctured 
 with narrow, pietistical morbidness, and certainly 
 two of her grandchildren — Robert Alan and 
 Robert Louis — did not derive their puzzling pecu- 
 liarities from her. Some of her characteristics 
 reappear in Mrs. Weir. "The scene has often been 
 described to me of my grandfather sawing with 
 darkened countenance at some indissoluble joint, 
 'Preserve me, my dear, what kind of a reedy, 
 stringy beast is this?' of the joint removed, 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 31 
 
 the pudding substituted and uncovered ; and of 
 my grandmother's anxious glance and hasty de- 
 precatory comment, ' Just mismanaged.' The cook 
 was a godly woman, the butcher a Christian man, 
 and the table suffered." Lord Hermiston's case is 
 almost parallel, Mrs. Weir having a household of 
 " Christian servants " quite incompetent like Mrs. 
 Robert Stevenson's. 
 
 Thomas Stevenson, brought up by this bigot- 
 edly pious mother, who early became such a 
 "veteran in affliction," had what her grandson 
 aptly describes as " a sense of humour under 
 strong control." About him was an air of imper- 
 turbable gravity, but below his portentous serious- 
 ness there often lurked a smile at the corner of 
 the firm-set mouth, and those who knew him 
 , best, knew the staunch, warmly affectionate nature 
 of the man. He looked on the sickly colour 
 and the high brow of his small Smout, and was 
 oppressed by the fear that his all-precious, only 
 child would wither away, for he remembered how 
 his brothers and sisters, though they had appeared 
 to be rosy and strong, never grew up. He came 
 of a healthy family. These were unsanitary times, 
 
32 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 and whooping cough and measles were rife in their 
 tightly packed flat. Thomas Stevenson used to 
 lull himself to sleep with self-told tales which dealt 
 perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old 
 sailors, and commercial travellers before the use 
 of steam. They seem to us the foundation of 
 many stories we know. In one of his essays 
 Louis speaks of Scotch children hearing much 
 of "shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless 
 breakers, and great sea-lights ; much of heathery 
 mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters." 
 There was certainly one Northern bairn who 
 heard much of these things as he sat on his 
 father's knee. This verbal record of the engineers 
 was full of a lively interest to young Louis. He 
 heard how French frigates threatened to capture 
 the engineer's ship ; how his father as a boy, tour- 
 ing with his father, was all but wrecked in a fog ; 
 and how they once fired a gun opposite a fishing 
 village in order to rouse up the inhabitants to 
 their help, and roused instead a camp of wreckers, 
 who calmly waited for them to drift on to the 
 rocks. All the history of these embryo days of 
 engineering was good to listen to, and little Louis 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 33 
 
 pondered over it and enacted some of the most 
 exciting bits anew in the nursery. He longed 
 then to grow up and go and light the mariner 
 home, and warn him of shoals by a newer Inch- 
 cape Bell, so — 
 
 "Whether fogs arise, and far and wide 
 The low sea level drown— each finds a tongue, 
 And all night long the bell resounds, 
 So shine, so toll, till night be overpast, 
 Till the stars vanish, till the sun return, 
 
 And in the haven rides the fleet secure." 
 
 Mr. Stevenson not only gave his little Tusitala 
 a taste for adventurous tales, but his peculiar 
 theories on education were the theories which 
 best suited his son. To look at Thomas Steven- 
 son a hasty observer would have thought he 
 had been one of those that uphold a rigid course 
 of study, and rigidly apply the tawse if need be. 
 But he himself in his learning time had been a 
 consistent idler, and he held he acquired more 
 by idling than he did on the school bench. He 
 would stop schoolboys in the street, look at their 
 burden of books, shake his head over such trash, 
 and advise them with earnestness to pay no 
 
 3 
 
34 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 heed to the rubbish which was being crammed 
 into them. He begged them to look about them, 
 play to their heart's content, but to read or study 
 only what their inclination dictated. The school- 
 boys would, open-mouthed, gaze at the firm-faced 
 man who seriously propounded such palatable 
 views. They keenly suspected he was making 
 fun of them, and went on their way puzzled. 
 He never ceased to expostulate against the 
 absurdity of education as conducted at present 
 in the seats of learning. Never by his father 
 was Louis asked how he stood in his classes. 
 Mr. Stevenson simply did not oppose the boy's 
 being sent to school. 
 
 One amusing episode of Robert Louis Steven- 
 son's school days and his father's manner of 
 teasing the boy comes down to us in one of 
 his minor pieces. " Robert's voice," a master 
 had said, " is not strong, but impressive." 
 " This opinion," Louis adds, " I was fool enough 
 to carry home to my father, who roasted me for 
 years in consequence." If Louis, in some dis- 
 pute or childish excitement, raised his tone to 
 a shrill pitch, Mr. Stevenson would listen with 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 35 
 
 intentional gravity, and when Louis's treble was 
 silenced would turn to a visitor and remark, 
 " Louis is noted at school tor his impressive 
 voice," and would meditate on their stupidity 
 in not having been impressed thereby, till their 
 attention had been drawn towards the force of 
 that not strong voice. Meanwhile the boy, smart- 
 ing under the well-applied rebuke, would in vain, 
 with his tones getting shriller at every word, 
 protest against this oft-recurring sarcasm, till, in 
 a fit of impotent rage, he would fly to the nursery 
 to be, praised and adored. All the flattery mother 
 and nurse lavished on him was not as sweet to 
 him as one word or glance of approval from his 
 father. When he was grown up, Mr. Stevenson 
 at times referred to this old blister, and Louis, 
 remembering the smart every allusion to his 
 impressive voice had given him when in frocks, 
 laughed at ' the remembrance. Even in these 
 after years, when the son had a ready affluence 
 of speech wherewith to argue and defend him- 
 self against his father, Mr. Stevenson, I think, 
 still came off victorious. Louis's talk was too 
 wordy and spoken in unheeding haste. It was 
 
36 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 like water sparkling on shallows. He gesticulated 
 the while impatiently. His father sat immov- 
 able, and brought the heavy artillery of his 
 speech to bear with annihilating force on the 
 feu de joie and rapid cannonade of words which 
 flowed from his son's lips. In fact, in peace or 
 war, Mr. Stevenson was very like the strong 
 towers he built, devoid of all elaborate flourishes, 
 solid, reliable, able to meet the strength of the 
 attacking waves without flinching, immovable as 
 they splashed or fretted or dashed around him. 
 A thorough man of business, inventing many 
 improvements for strengthening and perfecting 
 the revolving lights for the pharoses, acknowledged 
 at home and abroad as a distinguished man in 
 his profession, he had excellent taste and dis- 
 crimination in books, pictures, and engravings. 
 He was partial to sunflowers and antique furni- 
 ture. Long before they were revived as a 
 fashionable mania, Mr. Stevenson had a piece of 
 the handiwork of that .double-faced scoundrel, 
 Deacon Brodie, who was outwardly a cabinet- 
 maker and a respected official in the Church, 
 but who, beside his legitimate trade, lived by 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 37 
 
 gambling and burglary. Louis used to complain 
 that the Deacon's cabinet creaked eerily in the 
 night watches. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson had, his son says, "a morbid 
 sense of his own unworthiness. He would never 
 consent to be an elder in St. Stephen's, though 
 his advice was often sought, and he served the 
 Church of Scotland on many committees. Mor- 
 bid, too, was his sense of the fleetingness of life 
 and his concern for death." He once wrote, by 
 request of the editor of a Scottish religious 
 magazine, a paper entitled " Vanity of Vanities : 
 A Layman's Sermon." He preached well. It 
 is distinctly a sermon with grit in it. He de- 
 scribes a worldly man's death and funeral with 
 a grim truthfulness ; tells how the dead man's 
 friends, who had often met at his convivial board, 
 assemble in his dining-room for the last time 
 ere their host departs "to the narrow house 
 appointed for all living." With a few masterly 
 strokes he depicts the selfish heartlessness of the 
 dead man's household, the coachman in the 
 harness-room scanning the papers for a new 
 place, the gossiping conversation in the mourning 
 
38 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 coaches. " What do we think of his life ? " Mr. 
 Stevenson pointedly asks. " Are ours any truer 
 or better ? Have we done any more than he did 
 for the sick and suffering poor, or for Christ's 
 cause on the earth ? " Thomas Stevenson was 
 a man who pondered much on " the claims of 
 Christ and His cause." He was a man generous 
 in helping the sick or sorrowful in his sincere, 
 unobtrusive way, but that was one light he never 
 flashed before his fellows. He wrote also in the 
 defence of Christianity, and his work was highly 
 praised by many learned authorities. His " Lay- 
 man's Sermon " is to be found in a volume of 
 his Life and Work. It is a pity it is so deeply 
 buried, for many have evinced renewed interest 
 in it since they discovered that it was -preached 
 by the father of Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 In Edinburgh Mr. Stevenson "breathed an 
 air that pleased him," and into the country 
 round the fair city he loved to wander " with a 
 congenial friend, if he did not keep dangling 
 about the town from one book shop to another, 
 and scraping romantic acquaintance with every 
 dog that passed." He addressed all his canine 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 39 
 
 friends with a courteous civility." There was 
 a liver-and-white spaniel, which long lived a 
 vagrant existence about the west end of Princes 
 Street. Mr. Stevenson used to visit it constantly, 
 and invite it to lunch at a confectioner's. With 
 his slow, purposeful step he would turn aside out 
 of the throng to converse with his four-legged 
 acquaintance, and the spaniel, with hungry brown 
 eyes thirsting for notice, would gaze trustfully 
 up into his steady grey eyes. He christened 
 his friend by a family name, "Bob." I also 
 often greeted this stray spaniel, and Mr. Steven- 
 son was surprised one day when he found we 
 had a mutual friend. At first he pretended to 
 be jealous of any other patron of this spotted 
 dog, but he finally confided to me its name and 
 its tastes. If any one discovered him in a door- 
 way talking to or meditating over Bob, who 
 meanwhile wagged a joyous stumpy tail, and 
 held his head aloft so as to have his chin scratched 
 or his ears pulled, Mr. Stevenson was embarrassed 
 and apologetic. Sometimes at his own table, when 
 the wintry storm was driving at the windows and 
 he was sitting amid peace and plenty, he would, 
 
40 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 with real concern, wonder if " Bob " had got into 
 the shelter of some friendly doorway, or whether 
 he had strayed into the Caledonian station and 
 sought shelter by some lamp-room fire. Like 
 other Edinburgh dogs, "Bob" no doubt "raked 
 the backets," i.e., fed off the refuse boxes put 
 out nightly by householders for the dustmen 
 to lift next morning. On Saturday nights no 
 " backets " are put out, as no carts go rumbling 
 along on the Sabbath. Mr. Stevenson was sore 
 distressed that Sunday was unavoidably a fast 
 day for the spaniel and other homeless dogs. He 
 hoped "Bob" was foreseeing and buried a bone, 
 even if it had to be resurrected out of the West 
 Kirk-yard for his Sunday's dinner. Mr. Steven- 
 son only spoke of his four-footed friend when he 
 thought he had a sympathetic listener. He was 
 sincere in his affections, and in his conduct " trans- 
 parently honest," his son says ; but this earnest 
 simplicity of his made him much beloved 
 and much reverenced. Louis, even to a casual 
 observer, was an emotional youth, and evidently a 
 bundle of nerves, whims, and fancies. It surprised 
 strangers to find that the father, a grave, granite-. 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 41 
 
 looking man, was also full of strange theories, 
 fantastic thoughts, and an almost exaggerated 
 chivalry towards all laws and sentiments regard- 
 ing the weaker sex. His strong leaning to 
 melancholy gave him a pondering, deep-thinking 
 expression. His wife and child, on the other 
 hand, were of gay and sanguine disposition, yet 
 in strong sympathy with the head of the house. 
 It was lucky for all that they, in some measure, 
 counterbalanced his seriousness. The Rev. 
 Lewis Balfour was a " contented gentleman," we 
 read in his grandson's record, and it was well 
 that that youth had his full share of this bright- 
 some Balfour characteristic. He needed it, for 
 if Louis had inherited his father's diffident, dark- 
 ened nature, it would have gone hard with him. 
 He had so poor a measure of health that he 
 required all his mother's cheerful buoyancy of 
 spirit to carry him over the rough waters of con- 
 tinued sickness. His loss was really our gain 
 for it was owing to his ill health he was unable 
 to partake in doughty deeds. If he had been 
 able-bodied he would have acted them, and not 
 sat at home and imagined them on paper, for us 
 
42 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 as well as for himself. Out of his weakness 
 came his strength, or, as one said of him, " it 
 seems probable that the writer would have been 
 lost had the man been dowered with better 
 health." Perhaps his father's gloominess was an 
 efficient, warning to him to cultivate a Mark 
 Tapley jollity of spirits, whatever ill cards Fortune 
 dealt him. He early observed when Mr. Steven- 
 son encountered some comparative molehill in 
 his path and was oppressed with forebodings, 
 that these were dispelled by his mother's invinc- 
 ible determination to look only to the bright side 
 of things. 
 
 A writer in a magazine of to-day has stated that 
 Robert Louis Stevenson "was bored with his 
 father's stories, which others enjoyed, and his father 
 was a more lovable man than he in those days. 
 His unpopularity may have been due to his being 
 a bad listener." I do not think this was the 
 case, though I grant the father was a greater 
 favourite than the son, who, in his Edinburgh 
 days, was not generally liked. I personally 
 recollect that Louis seemed always ready to do 
 his utmost in company to draw out Mr. Steven- 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 43 
 
 son's quaint views or his pet stories. He listened 
 with a sparkle of pleasure in his almond-shaped 
 dark eyes, watching how his father's anecdotes 
 struck the audience, and more anxious than the 
 narrator for the merited approbation. Louis's 
 own way of spinning a yarn was ludicrously 
 different from his father's. Louis had a full flow 
 of language, and he gesticulated freely with both 
 hands while he talked and walked. He could 
 recapitulate no narrative, propound no idea, with- 
 out waving his thin hands about, shrugging his 
 shoulders absurdly like some typical stage 
 Frenchman. His father spoke in a measured, 
 calm voice, sitting slightly bent forward, with 
 his broad-browed, square-featured, unmistakably 
 Scotch face lit up at seasonable times by a 
 flicker of fun. He would preserve an immovable 
 solemnity of appearance while depicting some 
 humorous incident, and not till it was finished 
 and appreciated by his auditors did the corners 
 of his firmly set mouth relax into a smile. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson, with his wife and son, formed 
 a united trio. They had, besides the bonds of 
 affection that closely bound them, many tastes 
 
44 R- L- STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 in common, and a host of jests, a shibboleth of 
 nonsense which the engineer enjoyed as a re- 
 laxation from his work and its worries. " How 
 vivid is the remembrance of the happy home in 
 Heriot Row ! the kindly, clever head of the 
 house ; the bright, pleasant wife and mother ; 
 and the fragile, imaginative boy, who was after- 
 wards to become so famous," says a writer in 
 Chambers' Journal who evidently knew the trio 
 I speak of well. " We used to wonder how any 
 two of the three could exist if the third were 
 called away, each seemed so necessary to all." 
 
 When death, for the second time, made a gap 
 in the circle in December, 1894, the announcement 
 in the obituary column of the Scotsman described 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, not as the man of letters 
 the world deplored, but simply as " the only son 
 of the late Thomas Stevenson, C.E." To many in 
 his native Edinburgh he was known as that " only 
 son," whose future seemed all too doubtful in the 
 olden days, when he completed the trio round his 
 father's hearth. If he lived (and that was the fore- 
 most and biggest doubt), in the well-known adage 
 of his Northern land, where they sup their broth 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 45 
 
 with home-made cutlery, he seemed more likely 
 " to mar a horn " than " mak' a spune." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson and her son had often to flee 
 South on health pilgrimages, and leave the en- 
 gineer alone in the chilly North. He longed to 
 hear daily how they fared. The two invalids had 
 a difficulty in varying the bulletins, and they liked 
 variety. No letter had come from Torquay, so 
 Mr. Stevenson telegraphed for news. "Queen 
 Anne's dead," wired Louis, by his mother's sug- 
 gestion, in reply. The telegram gave the anxious, 
 lonely man a terrible shock, and he strongly re- 
 primanded the levity of the senders. The two 
 unrepentant culprits often jokingly reminded him 
 of the stern letter they received, and how for 
 the rest of that winter they were reduced to 
 platitudes on the weather or the beauty of 
 their resting-place. Then to defend himself Mr. 
 Stevenson explained what a shock Queen Anne's 
 death had given him that day, and drew a pathetic 
 picture of himself, a solitary man, opening the 
 orange envelope and, owing to a mist of anxiety 
 which dimmed his sight, seeing only two words, 
 " Dead.— Louis." 
 
46 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 The head of the house at Heriot Row died in 
 May, 1887, and a volume Louis brought out at 
 that time bore the beautiful dedication : — 
 
 To my Mother, 
 in THE 
 
 Name of Past Joy and Present Sorrow, 
 
 I Dedicate 
 
 These Memories and Portraits. 
 
 On a copy of these " honey-dropping essays " 
 he wrote a few lines in Samoa : — 
 
 " Much of my soul is here interred, 
 My very past and mind, 
 Who listens nearly to the printed word 
 May hear the heart behind." 
 
 Thomas Stevenson was honoured as well as 
 loved by his only son all through his life. Louis 
 knew well that, if his father seemed hard in his 
 censure, his wounds, like those of a friend, were 
 faithful ones. When he realized the responsi- 
 bility with which a conscientious man like his 
 father regarded the duty of bringing his son up 
 in the way he believed he should go, he under- 
 stood him all the better, and regretted he had 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 47 
 
 made his task the harder by resenting his legiti- 
 mate authority. In the Silverado Squatters Louis 
 speaks of a " brother Scot " who drove him about, 
 and was, he says, "as kind to me as if I were 
 his son ; even more so, for the son has -faults too 
 keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is per- 
 fect like a whiff of peats." 
 
 The father and son had a long dispute over 
 the latter's choice of a profession ; but when the 
 son became a master craftsman no one paid him 
 a surer compliment than did the father, who fain 
 would have seen him an engineer, the sixth who 
 had served the Board of Northern Lights. Mr. 
 Stevenson was a believer in Lord Lytton's theory 
 that "more is got from one book on which the 
 thought settles for a definite end in knowledge 
 than from libraries skimmed over by wander- 
 ing eyes. A cottage garden gives honey to the 
 bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly." 
 Louis tells us his father's three favourite 
 authors were Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal 
 Bona. "The first he must have read for twenty 
 years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him in his 
 study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. 
 
48 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS- 
 
 Another old theologian, Brown of VVamphray, 
 was often in his hands. When he was indisposed 
 he had two books, Guy Mannering and The 
 Parents Assistant, of which he never wearied." 
 To these select few Thomas Stevenson added 
 two more. They lay on a small table in his 
 dining-room, and were known by his family as 
 " his luncheon bibles." After breakfast he gathered 
 his household for " worship," and for this purpose 
 a big volume of the Book stood handy. After 
 his midday meal he liked a printed page to ponder 
 over. His two favourite luncheon bibles became 
 An Inland Voyage and the Travels with a 
 Donkey. 
 
 When he wandered with his son in print in 
 the Cevennes, he also longed to have an argument 
 with the soldier and the priest at the Lady of the 
 Snows who would have led to Rome Thomas 
 Stevenson, his wife, and their family. Honest 
 man ! how he thirsted to have his say and defend 
 his Presbyterianism. When they suggested to 
 Louis that if he would turn Catholic he would 
 convert his parents in time, he exclaimed, " I think 
 I see my father's face ! I would rather tackle the 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON • 49 
 
 Gaetulian lion in his den than embark on such 
 an enterprise against the family theologian." 
 
 Many a tough battle, many a wordy war, they 
 had, but they both enjoyed such skirmishes, 
 Louis freely confesses he liked "an adversary 
 who will hold his ground foot by foot and give 
 us full measure of the dust and exertion of battle." 
 Mr. Stevenson thought much over religion and 
 believed much. He was a resolute Presbyterian, 
 a man of strong convictions, but capable of de- 
 fending them. Louis had been well grounded in 
 the tenets of the Scottish Church. "About the 
 very cradle there goes a hum of metaphysical 
 divinity. I do not wish to make an idol of the 
 Shorter Catechism, but the fact of such a ques- 
 tion as, ' What is the chief end of man ? ' being 
 asked, and answering nobly if obscurely, ' To 
 glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever,' opens 
 to us Scotch a great field of speculation ; and 
 the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the 
 peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly 
 together." 
 
 As he grew up Louis developed very unortho- 
 dox, almost atheistical views, going, as youth goes 
 
 4 
 
50 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 when given to convulsions of thought, to the far 
 extreme from his upbringing. He also revelled 
 in blazoning abroad his newly acquired views. 
 He judged his father and every one who did 
 not agree with him as bigoted. He did not 
 realize that he himself was strongly tinctured 
 with the short-sighted, overbearing intolerance of 
 youthful inexperience. 
 
 Speaking of Ferguson, the poet, who died in 
 his " acute painful youth " in an Edinburgh mad- 
 house, Louis contrasts, in a letter lately published, 
 their mutual weakness and misunderstood suffer- 
 ings when both were rebellious, headstrong young 
 men. "Ah! what bonds we have. Born in the 
 same city, both sickly, both vicious, both pestered 
 — one nearly to madness and one to the mad- 
 house — with a damnatory creed, both seeing the 
 stars and the moon and wearing shoe leather on 
 the same ancient stones, under the same pends. 
 down the same closes where our common ances- 
 tors clashed in their armour rusty or bright." 
 
 Louis was less pestered than pestering with 
 the damnatory creed he speaks of. He liked to 
 heckle his father on his strict doctrines, while he 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON 51 
 
 aired his recently acquired ones. Mr. Stevenson 
 replied gravely and earnestly, and, all things con- 
 sidered, was wonderfully patient with the positive, 
 aggressive boy. " To grow a little Catholic is the 
 compensation of years ; youth is one-eyed," Louis 
 owned ; and if he had lived longer, or if his father 
 and he had met again after Louis left Edinburgh, 
 they might have found they were not so diverse 
 in doctrine. 
 
 Louis Stevenson improved with years. The 
 volcanic convulsions of his insurgent days past, 
 he mellowed in character, widened in understand- 
 ing, and harked back more to the contentment 
 and happy-hearted goodness which made him 
 lovable as a small child. When he shook so 
 violently at the bars of circumstance, and revolted 
 against religion and society, it was no wonder 
 he was not popular in Edinburgh, for he was 
 then lacking in many of the better qualities which 
 endeared him later to the whole world. Accord- 
 ing to descriptions of him in his latter days at 
 Samoa he seemed to have studied God's Book 
 more in the reverent manner it was studied and 
 read under his father's roof 
 
52 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Mr. Stevenson and his only son in the teeth 
 of their hot discussions and mutual heartaches 
 were to the last firm friends and comrades. 
 Thomas Stevenson, like his father before him, 
 was full of " unfeigned, unstained, unwearied 
 human kindliness." He was reticent with the 
 reticence of the Scot during his life. Anything 
 out of the ordinary groove which might be con- 
 strued into a wish to attract notice was repugnant 
 to him ; but he desired before the grave in the 
 Dean Cemetery closed over him that there should 
 be read to a few chosen friends his firm belief 
 in " that sure and certain hope," so that they who 
 truly loved and mourned him would have his 
 posthumous message impressed on their minds 
 that it might be to them a stay in time of need. 
 
 " 17, Heriot Row, Edinburgh. 
 
 " May I be allowed to say very humbly — God 
 knows how humbly — that, believing in Christ, I 
 confidently trust I shall not be disowned by Him 
 when the last trumpet shall sound. 
 
 " My good friends ! I hope our friendship is not 
 ended, but only for a time interrupted, and that 
 
THOMAS STEVENSON S3 
 
 we may all meet again in that better land which 
 has been prepared for us by our Father and our 
 Saviour, the blessed passport to which has been 
 freely offered to all. Amen. 
 
 "Thomas Stevenson. 
 
 "This 1 desire to be read at my funeral." 
 
Mrs. Stevenson 
 
" It is not yours, O mother, to complain, 
 Not, mother, yours to weep, 
 Though never more your son again 
 
 Shall to your bosom creep, 
 Though never more again you watch 
 Your baby sleep." 
 
 — Underwoods. 
 
 5« 
 
CHAPTER III 
 Mrs. Stevenson 
 
 LOUIS'S mother, as we have seen, was a 
 daughter of the manse. Her old home at 
 Colinton, " a well-beloved house, its image dwelt 
 on by many travellers," is now altered. To casual 
 observers, looking on a picture of it as it was in 
 Mrs. Stevenson's time, it seems much the same 
 as of yore. Casual observers, however, did not 
 know every door, window, and weather-beaten 
 mark on its friendly face, the place of every tree 
 and flower in its garden. The manse drinks deep 
 of the blessings of shelter. It lies in a cul-de-sac 
 at the very depth of a wooded basi n, " brimmed 
 like a cup with sunshine." Straight in front, 
 separated only from its base by the dusky Water 
 of Leith, rises a wooded cliff fringed with firs, 
 
58 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 a cliff so inaccessibly steep that it is a marvel how 
 such tall trees found root on its perpendicular and 
 sliding soil. They look as if they would topple 
 into the manse chimneys, but tier on tier firmly 
 they climb on, till they reach the top of the well- 
 clothed bluff, and the crows, then as now, caw 
 hoarsely over this sheltered hollow. Behind the 
 manse, and cutting it off from the road (Louis 
 speaks of their phaeton coming to the kitchen 
 door, " for such was our unlordly fashion "), stands 
 the church. Robert Louis Stevenson observed of 
 the manse, with th6 river lapping its garden, the 
 graveyard on the westerly side looking down on 
 it, that " it is difficult to suppose it was health- 
 ful." In those pre-hygienic times people throve 
 under conditions which, to us appear suicidally 
 insanitary. 
 
 An ever-increasing circle of villas, boasting, like 
 upstarts, of the superiority of their high and salubri- 
 ous site, look down on the old manse to-day, from 
 the airy rim of that once secluded den, now a 
 suburb of Edinburgh. Trains run through the dell 
 " where spunkies danced," as Louis believed, tak- 
 ing the residents of the mushroom villas to and 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 59 
 
 from Edinburgh, a few miles off. Miss Balfour, 
 the " Auntie " of Louis's Garden of Verses — 
 
 " Chief of our aunts— not only I 
 But all your dozen of nurslings cry, 
 What did the other children do ? 
 And what were childhood wanting you ? " — 
 
 remembers how little they thought of that inter- 
 vening four miles ; how they returned from their 
 walk to town, recollecting a forgotten errand, set 
 off again to Auld Reekie. Miss Balfour, kept 
 young by her practical interest in all the successive 
 families of nephews and nieces she has mothered, 
 speaks enviously of the ease with which her grand- 
 nieces spin on cycles over the ground. " You 
 would have enjoyed one when you were young," 
 said a visitor. " I'd enjoy one now," she replied, 
 for neither deafness nor failing sight has quelled 
 the sprightly spirit of her race. Mrs. Stevenson, 
 fond of her early home, like all who were reared in 
 that green-lined nest, loved to take her boy back 
 to Colinton, little dreaming the old manse would 
 be portrayed so vividly by the small hand she 
 held. 
 She was married in 1848, and when she left her 
 
60 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 father's roof for Howard Place, if the old proverb 
 speaks true, she need not have given much 
 thought to her trousseau, " for a bonnie bride is 
 soon buskit." All those who recollect her then, 
 speak of her fair looks — looks which lasted to the 
 end of her sixty-eight years ; for, besides her clear- 
 cut features, her cultured mind, her genial address, 
 gave her a perennial beauty of expression that out- 
 lived the bloom of youth. Her buoyancy of spirit, 
 her complacent serenity in regard to the inevitable, 
 her pleased contentment with her environments 
 — all these Louis learned from her. Mrs. Steven- 
 son was twenty years her son's senior, and it 
 amused and flattered them both that, when 
 going out to dinner together, the servant, judging 
 him to be too young to be married, turned a deaf 
 ear to the names they gave, and announced them 
 as Mr. and Miss Stevenson. 
 
 There is extant a chalk drawing of Mrs. Steven- 
 son when about twenty-five, and one of Louis done 
 at the same time. He has stiff, old-maidish ring- 
 lets, which must have given Cummy much trouble 
 to fix in such sleek order. They are so rigid as to 
 suggest being supported in their position by hair- 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 61 
 
 pins. These unnatural curls. were shortly after- 
 wards shorn. Mr. Stevenson took advantage of 
 Cummy's being off on a holiday to subject Smoutie's 
 lady-like locks to the barber's mercy. Cummy has 
 them now among her keepsakes ; very fine yellow 
 hair it is, not yet darkened to correspond with his 
 oriental eyes and complexion. The chalk drawing 
 of Mrs. Stevenson represents her, as Louis remem- 
 bered her so well, when she chaperoned him to 
 children's parties. He proudly boasted that no 
 child had so pretty a mother as he. When he was 
 a man he recalled how others had heavy, serious 
 mothers who " who sat and looked on," while his 
 mother was so girlishly graceful and so light- 
 heartedly blithe that no juvenile guest enjoyed 
 herself with more zest than she. From this 
 picture her refined face smiles down on one 
 Her smooth hair is braided over her ears in the 
 mid- Victorian style, making a softening frame to 
 her regular features. It is exactly the same face 
 we in Edinburgh, who knew her till so recently, 
 loved. Mrs. Stevenson always impressed one as 
 being richly dressed, though no one could say 
 when asked, what she wore, so invariably quiet 
 
62 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 and ladylike was her taste. Certainly from neither 
 of his parents did Louis take his bizarre fancy for 
 garish colour and fashion in dress. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson's pliableness of temperament 
 was never more clearly shown than in the way 
 she cast off civilization, in spite of her love for 
 everything that was correctly comfortable, and 
 set off to follow her migratory son among un- 
 couth surroundings in distant lands. She went 
 stockingless and clothed in easy garments, and 
 lived that primitive life as if to the manner 
 born. She heartily enjoyed the roughing of it, 
 though the opportunity of basking in the sun- 
 shine of her son's presence first induced her to 
 leave the comforts of civilization. Looking over 
 the photographs of these South Sea journeyings, 
 Mrs. Stevenson appeared always decorously attired 
 in her widow's cap, retaining even there her spruce 
 trigness, her hair as usual smoothly dressed, when 
 others had flower-entwined heads and flowing, un- 
 kempt locks. " Whenever I saw the camera come 
 to the fore," she explained, smiling, " I seized my 
 cap out of the basket where I kept it ready, and 
 'preened my feathers.' I tucked in my feet, 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 63 
 
 though I never went quite barefoot like the others, 
 for I was terrified of stepping on some beast. I 
 never could walk without shoes, but of course I 
 wore no stockings, except when I went to church. 
 They laughed at me, but, however warm, I always 
 put them on for service." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson transplanted herself and all her 
 old home furniture out to Vailima, meaning to 
 settle there for her life, never dreaming, as she said, 
 • " to weep the eyes that should have wept for me,'' 
 but, she added in the same letter, with that un- 
 selfish resignation, that determination to see good 
 in everything, "His dear eyes have been saved 
 these tears, and / must be glad for that" In his 
 own words she could truly say, and comfort herself 
 therewith — 
 
 " O stricken heart, remember, O remember, 
 How of human days he lived the better part." 
 
 Frail in health, as Louis had ever been, it was 
 more than probable he might be one of those 
 creaking doors which are said to hang longest. 
 Mrs. Stevenson herself had suffered from the 
 inclement winds of Edinburgh. Her father, in his 
 
"64 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 youth, had sought for health in the Isle of Wight, 
 and his grandson, after trying both hemispheres, 
 enviously adds, " whereas he found it and kept it, 
 I am still on the quest." 
 
 Two of Dr. Lewis Balfour's children were ail- 
 some in youth, and it appeared unlikely they would 
 resist the effects of the deeply-buried situation of 
 the manse and its overshadowing graveyard. Yet 
 they grew up and went out into the world like the 
 others reared there, and survive to-day, hale and 
 hearty, having passed useful lives in the thick of 
 our too maligned Edinburgh climate. Louis, when 
 grown-up, often tempted providence by outlandish 
 expeditions, unnecessary buffetings with weather, 
 and want of proper comfort. After settling finally 
 in what he thought salubrious Samoa, the lights of 
 his life, which had " been a little turned down," had 
 flared up astonishingly strong again, and it was 
 believed the author had found an El-dorado, 
 where his health would, as his years advanced, 
 increase in strength. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson came back twice to this country 
 from the enervating softness of her son's island 
 retreat to recruit and see her sister, and finally in 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 65 
 
 1 891 took herself and all the endeared belongings 
 of her married home to Samoa. 
 
 The familiar furnishings of Heriot Row sailed to 
 the South, where they remain. They were for ever 
 associated with her husband and boy ; how often 
 had they watched him when, as he recorded — 
 
 " With my little gun, I crawl 
 All in the dark along the wall, 
 And follow round the forest track 
 Away behind the sofa back." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson fully expected to end her life 
 with her boy at Vailima. His improved health 
 gave every hope for years- of useful work before 
 him. His mother never believed he would achieve 
 the " fine success " he craved for in her lifetime. 
 Louis always hoped that his end would be speedy 
 when his time came. " If only I could secure a 
 violent death, what a fine success!" he writes. "I 
 wish to die in my boots ; no more Land of Counter- 
 pane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be 
 thrown from a horse, aye, to be hanged, rather 
 than pass again through that slow dissolution." 
 
 Victor Hugo likens an overwhelming blow to a 
 Waterloo, a slow decay a St. Helena. The 3rd 
 
 5 
 
66 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 December, 1894, was a Waterloo to the Vailima 
 household. On none did it fall heavier than on 
 his mother, who had known and loved him longest, 
 who was now a widow and childless, and who had 
 lost a son of whom she had the right to be proud, 
 for she had been the first to foresee the honoured 
 position he would attain to by his pen. She re- 
 turned to Edinburgh immediately after his death, 
 to the one tie she had left there, Miss Balfour, her 
 elder sister, who had mothered her in her school 
 days. Miss Balfour needed her, so Mrs. Stevenson 
 settled down in Edinburgh, choosing for her new 
 home a house which overhung the valley of the 
 Leith. At first her old friends were afraid to see 
 her, for fear the trials she^had encountered since 
 she had left them would have left defacing scars 
 upon her and her wound be still too painful to look 
 on. But she came back and took her former place 
 with unflinching bravery, and the one theme she 
 specially liked to hear others broach, or to enlarge 
 on herself, was Louis. Appreciation of him was 
 balm to her wounds. She had his photographs 
 around her, and from Samoa had brought back one 
 link with Heriot Row, a striking likeness of her 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 67 
 
 husband, by Sir George Reid, now to be seen in 
 the Edinburgh National Portrait Gallery. That 
 supple nature of hers allowed her to take her place 
 once more in an orthodox Edinburgh drawing-room, 
 and it was hard to realize that she, sitting there 
 in her faultless widow's attire, darning daintily with 
 her capable hands, had gone about stockingless, 
 ridden through forest paths, and sat at feasts with 
 the Samoan chiefs. She said she might return 
 some time to visit that grave on the mountain top 
 where she had seen her son laid. She had always 
 taken an interest too in foreign missions, and she 
 had a longing to work for her Church among the 
 Samoans. So quietly and quickly did she resettle 
 in the North, one almost forgot she had ever been 
 away in such untamed parts. Mrs. Stevenson had 
 a spirit of enterprise in her, a liking to subject 
 herself to experiences, an inquisitiveness as to 
 novelties, and Louis inherited this thirst to taste 
 of the unknown. Mrs. Stevenson never lost her 
 taste for exploring a terra incognita. In the last 
 September she was among us, being in the country 
 she expressed a wish to get on a cycle to try how 
 it felt, and write to those left at Vailima and tell 
 
68 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 them what she thought of it. There was a wheel 
 put at her disposal christened Dobbin, in the hopes 
 that sedate name would incline it to steadiness. 
 Lithe of figure, straight as an arrow, undeterred by 
 her sixty-seven years, Mrs. Stevenson vaulted on 
 the iron horse with ease, and displayed an instinc- 
 tive idea of balance. She said she knew she had 
 an inborn notion of equilibrium from the way she 
 had kept her seat all untutored as an equestrian 
 on a flesh and blood horse in Samoa. Not con- 
 tented only to mount Dobbin, she, barely supported 
 by an anxious teacher, sent him gaily along the 
 road on which he had borne many wobbling 
 beginners. None, however, managed him better 
 than this agile, well-balanced sexagenarian rider 
 in mantle and bonnet, garments which she 
 said befitted her years, but were hampering for 
 this exercise. The second day she careered on 
 Dobbin down a hill, steering well to the middle 
 of the road and going at a pace which left her 
 attendant in the rear. "If people would not think 
 it ridiculous of me, I think I would take to cycling," 
 she said when an upward slope brought her journey 
 to a triumphant finish. " It is delightful. I envy 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 69 
 
 people I see from my windows at Randolph Cliff 
 whirling across the Dean Bridge." 
 
 That same September she visited a lighthouse 
 on a great foreland which was one of her husband's 
 beacons. The keepers received her cordially. 
 They showed her Thomas Stevenson's unsurpassed 
 inventions and his signature on their books. They 
 asked her for her autograph, and expressed their 
 gratification in having seen the wife of one 
 
 "Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled 
 To plant a star for seamen," 
 
 and his son proudly boasted, — 
 
 "These are thy works, O father, these thy crown, 
 Whether on high the air be pure, they shine 
 Along the yellowing sunset, and all night 
 Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson quoting these lines among the 
 sounds of winds and wings and solitary cries, 
 observed it was pleasing to her to be honoured 
 and welcomed as Thomas Stevenson's wife ; " for 
 of late years," she said, " I have become so 
 accustomed to be known only as R. L. S.'s 
 mother." She reminded us, too, of an incident 
 Louis refers to in his sketch of his father ; how a 
 
70 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 friend of his was asked in South America if " he 
 knew Mr. Stevenson, the author, because his works 
 were much esteemed in Peru. He supposed the 
 reference was to the writer of tales ; but the Peru- 
 vian had never heard of Dr. Jekyl, what he had 
 in his eye, what was esteemed in Peru, were the 
 volumes of the engineer." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson, clever and cultured as she was, 
 never wished for any distinctive career of her own. 
 To her it was acceptable to be known either as the 
 wife of Thomas Stevenson (to whom the Germans 
 gave the title of " the Nestor of lighthouse illumi- 
 nation ") or the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 Finding herself reverenced as the parent of a 
 distinguished son when she went to visit Louis 
 at Skerryvore, his Bournemouth home, she was 
 told that the Shelleys had been attracted to him, 
 and Louis had been given by Sir Percy a portrait 
 of Mary Wollstonecraft ; and Mrs. Stevenson heard 
 how Sir Percy thought her son was mentally like 
 his father, and that the poet's spirit lived again in 
 R. L. S. This portrait our Tusitala was to look 
 on as that of a spiritual ancestress, from whom 
 he inherited a pedigree of genius ; and it hung at 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 71 
 
 Vailima among Stevenson family portraits of the 
 engineers. Mrs. Stevenson told us, hearing Lady 
 Shelley had called and was alone, she glancing 
 at herself in a glass to see there was no hair awry, 
 went smiling into the room, ready, she said, to be 
 adored as the mother of the man her visitor and 
 Sir Percy flattered and praised. But, when she 
 introduced herself, Lady Shelley rose indignantly 
 and turned from her proffered hand. She accused 
 Mrs. Stevenson of having robbed her of a son, for 
 she held Louis should have been sent to her, that 
 he was the poet's grandson ; but by some perverse 
 trickery, of which she judged Mrs. Stevenson 
 guilty, this descendant of Percy Bysshe had come 
 to a house in Howard Place, Edinburgh, instead 
 of hers at Boscombe Manor. A somewhat parallel 
 case happened to Dr. Johnson on his travels ; for 
 Lady Eglintoune found, says Boswell, that she 
 "was married the year before Dr. Johnson was 
 born, upon which she graciously said to him that 
 she might have been his mother and that she now 
 adopted him, and when we were going away she 
 embraced him saying, 'My dear son, farewell.' 
 Lady Eglintoune, like Lady Shelley, adopted a 
 
72 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 " might have been son." Louis Stevenson himself 
 believed he had fallen heir to Robert Ferguson's 
 unhappy poetic soul ; while Lady Shelley, ac- 
 cording to Mrs. Stevenson, was firmly convinced 
 that she had been defrauded of a son, and never 
 abated in her animosity towards her for this 
 robbery. This, said Mrs. Stevenson, was the only 
 time any one fell foul of her for having given to 
 the world the popular author. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson had early guessed in what direc- 
 tion lay her Louis's road to fame. She fostered 
 his love of writing, and was, with Cummy, the 
 first of his devoted readers. Even if he had never 
 grown famous, to hear her in her latter years speak 
 of " Little Lew " would have drawn listeners about 
 her, for she had the art of telling a simple tale 
 with pathos and humour, which impressed it on 
 her hearers. Her unceasing interest in everything 
 connected with him, her every thought given so 
 wholly to him, made her listeners in her drawing- 
 room, looking adown the valley, realize how great 
 was her love. She, so " austerely led," was never 
 seen otherwise than "well content." If people 
 marvelled at her heartsome blitheness of spirit, 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 73 
 
 she with her serene felicity replied she had small 
 cause to repine with a happy record of married 
 life to dwell on, and having been gifted with a son 
 whose genius she was the first to appreciate, whose 
 distinguished position in the world of letters was 
 her glory and comfort. In acknowledging a 
 photograph of the plain-faced little house in 
 Howard Place, she wrote : " How I wish I was 
 back in it forty-five years ago! Well, I had a 
 long time of happiness. I have many precious 
 memories left, and I feel that I have much cause 
 for thankfulness, but still my heart cries out for 
 ' my boy.' " Grief never wrung an audible com- 
 plaint from her. It was her unselfishness which 
 enabled her to face her sorrow and the interest she 
 took in the weal or woe of all around her. To the 
 world, to the sister she tended, she turned a serene, 
 placid face. 
 
 She had treasured up all her recollections of 
 Louis from his babyhood. She had kept all news- 
 paper cuttings about him from the days when his 
 youthful efforts first appeared in print. She had 
 his six-year-old dictated MS., an essay on Moses, 
 and his privately printed little booklets, now so 
 
74 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 sought after by collectors. Shirley speaks of stroll- 
 ing one long, light evening from his Hermitage 
 of Braid with Principal Tulloch across to Swan- 
 ston and getting there a volume in which Robert 
 Louis Stevenson's "juvenile contributions to local 
 journals had been carefully put together and 
 preserved. We read them next morning — the 
 Principal in his bedroom before breakfast, as 
 was his way — and we then agreed that, what- 
 ever came of it, here was a fresh voice with 
 a note delicate and unborrowed as the lark's. 
 Hardly any one but his mother guessed as yet 
 what was in store ; but she was prescient, as 
 mothers are." Among many who visited her for 
 her son's sake came Mr. Barrie, when she was home 
 from Samoa, one winter. He was anxious for her 
 to meet his mother, and Mrs. Stevenson regretted 
 she had not taken the journey to Thrums. Mrs. 
 Stevenson was much amused at the way in which 
 he tried to tempt her to find time to go. If Mrs. 
 Barrie in her loyalty to her own son bore Robert 
 Louis Stevenson a grudge, why, Mrs. Stevenson 
 asked, would she care to see her? 
 
 " She would like," answered Mr. Barrie, " to tell 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 75 
 
 you how I came through the whooping cough, and 
 ask you if your son had any dregs from the 
 measles." 
 
 How interesting it would have been to 
 have had a photograph of these two mothers 
 discussing their sons, their books, or their in- 
 fantine ailments ! If Mrs. Stevenson and she 
 had met, it is to be hoped Mrs. Stevenson 
 would have walked in unawares and caught Mrs. 
 Barrie by the hearth we know and perchance 
 sitting with that unholy fascinating knave, Ballan- 
 trae. Her piercing but kindly eyes would have 
 scrutinized the handsomely dressed mother of the 
 man whom she feared would have wiled her de- 
 votedlad away from her to his tropic retreat. It 
 would have defied Margaret Ogilvy's penetrating 
 observation to have found a fault with her guest's 
 appearance. However blowy the day, there would 
 not have been one hair astray, or however dusty 
 not a speck of travel-stain on her fine black 
 dress. Mrs. Stevenson was always immaculately 
 trim in her attire. Mrs. Barrie would have found 
 the whilom daughter of the manse, with that ready 
 address of hers, eager to listen to Thrums tales, 
 
76 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 of honours to a Thrums man, or to a Thrums 
 boy's precocity. Mrs. Stevenson would have en- 
 vied her hostess having " her boy " there, and 
 doubtless Mrs. Barrie with her quick intuition 
 would have found the Road to that Loving Heart 
 by her sympathy for the mother who loved be- 
 yond compare the " only son " granted to her, and 
 who mourned him with a Spartan cheerfulness. 
 Mrs. Stevenson read with an understanding smile 
 of Mrs. Barrie's jealous aversion, her gradual 
 capitulation to R. L. S.'s seductive writing, and 
 she deplored too late, with Margaret Ogilvy 
 in her hand, that she had not journeyed to 
 Thrums. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson's absorbing pride in her son was 
 as transparent as her husband's succouring lights 
 which flash out, dazzling in their concentrated 
 strength. Abnormal as it was, there was no vain- 
 gloriousness in it, only pure prideful pleasure un- 
 dimmed by any small selfish conceits. Whether 
 she was fonder of the author as the new master 
 of romance, the subtle supple stylist, or her boy, 
 " Little Lew," it is hard to say. Often and often 
 she heard, as she sat in " peaceful turret pent," not 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 77 
 
 the applause of the many who loved his tales, but 
 his pattering footsteps. Even in remembrance 
 that was sweetest music to her. She obeyed 
 his injunctions as she had obeyed his slightest 
 desire she could gratify in life. 
 
 "You too, my mother, read my rhymes 
 For love of unforgotten times, 
 And you may chance to hear once more 
 The little feet along the floor." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson, when she returned finally to 
 
 Edinburgh from Samoa — 
 
 "For 
 It brooks wi' nae denial, 
 
 That the dearest friends are the auldest friends, 
 And the young are just on trial " — 
 
 liked to be of the audience at every lecture on 
 Robert Louis Stevenson she saw advertised. 
 There were many, for he had given to us a host of 
 life-long friends. To him we owe the acquaint- 
 anceship of honest Alan Breck and his companion 
 Davie Balfour, of many a clever scoundrel and bold 
 rascal, of Archie Weir and his " owre true " father ; 
 and lastly, that dashing dare-devil St. Ives, who 
 took us over the Castle Rock and led us to further 
 intimate acquaintance with Swanston. Then, be- 
 
78 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 sides numerous friends on paper, he gave us these 
 essays full of living words arranged with that 
 felicitous grace of expression of which he was the 
 consummate master. "Folk come here speirin' 
 about young Stevenson sin' he is deid," said the 
 present gardener at Swanston, speaking of pilgrim 
 Stevensonians who bother him with questions ; for 
 Thackeray, with his cognizance of human nature, 
 says truly, " We all want to know details regarding 
 men who have achieved famous feats, whether of 
 war or wit, or eloquence or knowledge." Some- 
 times illustrating these lectures on Tusitala there 
 were lime-light views, and one felt, as Mrs. Steven- 
 son saw before her on the screen a well-known 
 scene, and heard quoted — 
 
 " I gang nae mair where ance I gaed, 
 By Brunston, Fairmilehead or Braid, 
 But far frae Kirk and Tron"— 
 
 it must have been a stab anew for her to realize 
 
 that, no longer a willing exile in a palmy isle, he 
 
 lived so that across the waste of waters he would 
 
 send his voice, and end the verse : — 
 
 "O still ayont the muckle sea, 
 Still are ye dear, and dear to me, 
 Auld Reekie still and on." 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 79 
 
 Others felt a lump in their throats when they re- 
 membered that he had lain him down with a will. 
 There was no hope now that, some day when a 
 breath of the North came to him, he might be 
 tempted to come home. No more letters, no 
 more books of his could come across the globe to 
 us. The blank was difficult to realize, but all the 
 while his mother sat critical and intent, apparently 
 unruffled by any emotion but her pleasure in hear- 
 ing her son's praises sung, his death lamented. 
 
 The Stevenson Memorial meeting was a gala 
 day to her. She started for the Music Hall 
 not too early, feeling secure of a seat with a 
 "reserve ticket" in her neatly gloved hand. 
 When some one asked if she were going on the 
 platform, she replied emphatically in the nega- 
 tive. She had early Victorian ideas as to 
 platforms being proper only for the sterner sex. 
 She wished to be an unnoticed unit in the 
 audience. The crowd was beyond expectations. 
 Mrs. Stevenson arrived to find every passage 
 blocked, and a surging mass at the main entrance 
 clamouring for admittance. She feared that she, 
 with them, would be turned away ; but, as a 
 
8o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 forlorn hope, she appealed to a policeman to get 
 her in. 
 
 " It's nae use, it's fu'," he said ; " reserve seats 
 ta'en an hour ago by folks that had nae tuckets, 
 and they would na gang out." 
 
 " I must get in," cried Mrs. Stevenson, roused 
 out of her usual calm by despair. " I've a right 
 to get in. I am Robert Louis Stevenson's 
 mother." 
 
 "Aye, you've the best right," the policeman 
 replied, and, turning to the crowd, cried, "Mak' 
 way there. She maun get in. She's Roabert 
 Louis's mither." 
 
 People who thought themselves packed too 
 tightly to move somehow packed closer, and let 
 Mrs. Stevenson squeeze and wriggle past. 
 
 Breathless, hustled, and, for once, her mantle 
 and bonnet a little awry, much against her will 
 the crowd pushed her on to the platform. There 
 she hastened to so literal a back seat that when 
 Lord Rosebery, to add to his tactful compli- 
 ment to her in the four telling words, "his 
 mother is here," with which he well-nigh began 
 his speech, looked around to bow with courtly 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 81 
 
 deference to her, he had to pause (and the pause 
 was very effective), and to quietly engage other 
 eyes as well as his own to find to which side 
 Robert Louis's mother had unobtrusively with- 
 drawn. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson was all aglow with the enthusi- 
 astic fulness of that meeting. She was visibly 
 overcome by the unexpectedly large crowd and 
 its tremendous enthusiasm. For once her usual 
 calm left her. 
 
 " A proud day for her to have a son a mitred 
 bishop," writes Louis in Our Lady of the Snows, 
 of one who by " special grace, against usual 
 ordinance," was able to witness the crowning of 
 her child. " It makes one glad they let her in," 
 he adds sympathetically. A proud day was 
 December 9th, 1896 (two years after her Water- 
 loo), to Mrs. Stevenson, and she was thankful 
 for the " special grace " even in the shape of the 
 policeman who ushered her in to see her son, 
 like a prophet, for long without honour in his 
 own country, receive the homage of his native 
 town. 
 
 A few months later, with Louis's name last on 
 
 6 
 
82 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 her lips, after a short struggle with pneumonia, 
 she died. She was laid beside her husband in 
 the Dean Cemetery, that beautiful burial ground 
 in the west of Edinburgh. From it, secluded by 
 trees from the city, the great castle is seen 
 towering majestically, and round it, deep down 
 a bosky bank, the Water of Leith winds. That 
 humble brown stream lilted a lullaby, in very 
 truth a cradle song, to Mrs. Stevenson at the old 
 manse. It made lasting music in the memory 
 of her only son, who lies afar in that strange 
 mountain grave with the surf booming an in- 
 cessant requiem at its feet. He yearned to rest 
 among the good Scots clods with familiar stars, 
 true never-failing Northern lights, and the historic 
 hills of home keeping watch over him. 
 
 Perhaps the best, nay, the only explanation 
 of Mrs. Stevenson's uncomplaining front in the 
 face of her sorrow, when bereft of that brilliant 
 idolized son, is to be found in the Heriot Row 
 Bible she gave to an Edinburgh church. On a 
 leaf of it, in Mr. Stevenson's hand, is the date 
 of his marriage. Then, again, in it he wrote 
 the date of the birth of Robert Lewis Balfour, 
 
MRS. STEVENSON 83 
 
 their son. She added to it in her writing the 
 record of her husband's death, and then, when 
 a widow and childless, that of "her boy," their 
 only son. After that last date, she added, from 
 Psalm xxxix. 9, the words which gave the key 
 of her cheerful, silent fortitude when so bitterly 
 acquainted with grief — " I was dumb, I opened 
 not my mouth ; because Thou didst it." 
 
Alison Cunningham 
 
"For all you pitied, all you bore 
 In sad and happy days of yore, 
 My second mother, my first wife, 
 The angel of my infant life.'' 
 — The Dedication to the " Garden of Verses} 
 
 *6 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Alison Cunningham 
 
 A NOTHER guardian of Louis's childhood 
 ■**■ was Alison Cunningham. The day which 
 brought them together when he was eighteen 
 months old is worthy of a red-letter record in 
 Louis's calendar. Many a child has had as devoted 
 a nurse as young Louis, but no nurse from her 
 nursling had ever so deftly worded or so widely 
 known a tribute to her care as Alison Cunningham 
 received in the dedication of the Garden of Verses. 
 He remembered, when he penned these lines, the 
 "long nights you lay awake and watched for 
 my unworthy sake " ; he knew then that his second 
 mother would have followed him across the world, 
 to nurse him as of yore, when he lay ill. The 
 letter she wrote volunteering to go to her laddie 
 he held in his clasp, as if to feel again the 
 
 8 7 
 
88 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 touch of that " comfortable hand " which had 
 soothed away his childhood's sufferings. She 
 well deserved the pretty tribute that her boy 
 thus paid her in remembrance of all the pains 
 she comforted. She gave her whole heart and 
 energies to her charge. To her, as well as to 
 his mother, he owed his happy disposition. He 
 was never thwarted or denied anything that could 
 add to his happiness. Never a complaining word 
 escaped his nurse's lips, and he grew up sur- 
 rounded by the love of his two mothers. Kept 
 for such long spells in the house, he was more 
 dependent than most on a kindly, patient ruler 
 in the nursery. Night and day the child had 
 to be watched and amused. His active brain 
 supplied an endless series of questions, and he 
 never rested till they were answered. Cummy 
 had enjoyed a solid education such as falls to 
 most of her kind if they have the good fortune 
 to be born Scots. She came of a family of fair 
 worldly means and position. She belonged to the 
 good old days when domestic service was not 
 scorned as menial, when it was considered a more 
 fitting and honoured calling than service behind 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 89 
 
 a counter. Cummy's education was not wasted. 
 When she and Smout, as he said, spent 
 
 " Happy chimney-corner days, 
 Sitting safe in nursery nooks 
 Reading picture story books," 
 
 it was a trained as well as a " kind voice " that 
 read to him with ease and expression. No one 
 enjoyed the works he afterwards gave to the world 
 more than the nurse who with his mother, on 
 the nursery floor, taught the wee lad to find, 
 from out of the chaos of letters, C for Cummy 
 or crooked S for Stevenson. 
 
 " Cummy," as she had been promptly christened 
 by her small charge, was reared at Torryburn, 
 a village even to-day out of the reach of trains 
 and placidly stranded on the north bank of the 
 Firth of Forth, whose waters lap up to its very 
 doors. It is a village of white houses, red roofs, 
 crow-stepped gables basking lazily in the sun. 
 Torryburn, along with some other of these west 
 of Fife boroughs, was of more importance when 
 the king sat in Dunfermline town. The smaller 
 ships of bygone times sailed up the unbridged 
 
9 o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Firth to unload their cargoes at wharves snug 
 under the bield of wooded bluffs. 
 
 This west nook of the Kingdom of Fife, facing 
 the sun and protected from the hard winds, is to- 
 day still a green, sleepy hollow, lulled to rest 
 by the curfew, which still tolls nightly from 
 Culross steeple. Cummy grew up in this place, 
 rich with traditions of its past glories, and full 
 of the history and legends of her native land. 
 At her father's hearth she heard the old-time 
 tales of the smuggling days, and all the local 
 narratives of the resurrectionist times. Close to 
 the water's edge, along the fringes of Fife, were 
 many graveyards easy of access to those who 
 plied their ghastly trade. The people, knowing 
 how corpses had been stolen from their resting- 
 place, lived then in dread of their dead being 
 molested. Nevertheless, for all their watchfulness 
 many a boat went off with its gruesome cargo. 
 It was for this reason that Cummy's mother, dying 
 in 1870, ordered she should not be buried among 
 her people in Torryburn kirkyard, but in a town 
 cemetery, where such desecration was impossible. 
 We may be sure in good time young Louis knew 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 91 
 
 all the stories, true or traditionary, that Cummy 
 had to tell. 
 
 She had learned all she could be taught at 
 Torryburn, where a relative of Cummy's, a Miss 
 Drummond, combined dressmaking and school- 
 keeping. Miss Drummond helped her sisters to 
 shape the lasting linsey-woolsey of the day into 
 fashionable gowns ; and while she plied her needle 
 or trimmed a tippet, she heard her pupils recite. 
 It is true that, on the " Burial of Sir John Moore," 
 perhaps owing to her absorption in her sewing, 
 or a dimness of sight, which took in the look 
 of a word and not its exact meaning, Sir John, 
 at Torryburn was buried with his material cloak 
 around him. In these dame schools, however, even 
 if they read " material " for "martial," the scholars 
 laid a firm foundation of learning. Alison was 
 a promising pupil, and her parents, to give a finish 
 to her education, sent her off to Dunfermline, four 
 or five miles distant. Alison had to live there 
 in the darkest winter days with some relatives, 
 but she preferred Torryburn, and at week ends 
 she returned hpme, walking at the tail of the 
 carrier's cart for company. She made light of 
 
92 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the distance in summer, and walked gladly to and 
 fro. Even now she is spare and active, though 
 deafness has shut her off from the world of voices. 
 Mrs. Stevenson and Cummy used to tell little 
 Lew, when he began his school-going, that his lines 
 had fallen in easy times. His guardians had had 
 to rise in the dark and walk eight or ten miles 
 daily for their lessons. 
 
 Alison Cunningham never swerved in her 
 allegiance to her tender, ailing boy. In 1870 
 Louis wrote a dissertation on Nurses, in which he 
 draws a sad (all the sadder because it is true) 
 picture of • a nurse neglected by her nursling 
 when he grew up, — she was left alone after having 
 given "her best and happiest years in tending, 
 watching, and learning to love like a mother this 
 child, with which she has no connection, and 
 to which she has no tie. Perhaps she refused 
 some sweetheart (such things have been), or put 
 him off and off, until he lost heart and turned 
 to some one else, all for fear of leaving this 
 creature that had wound itself about her heart." 
 He goes on to picture the Testament she bought 
 for her boy out of her poorly provided purse, 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 93 
 
 thrown aside, and how, maybe, he passed her in 
 the street, ashamed to recognise the old woman 
 that loved him. Louis as a youth of twenty-one 
 had noted how many of his friends' old nurses 
 were treated, but his had no reason to complain. 
 Her boy to the last did not forget her, always 
 " rememberful " whenever he had a new book of 
 his own to give her. " Mothers," Louis wrote at 
 the end of Nurses, " can be brought to feel 
 more tenderly to those who share their toil and 
 have no part in the reward." Cummy had 
 full share of her " reward " — a word her boy 
 objected to. "The world must return some day 
 to the word duty and be done with the word 
 reward. There are no rewards and plenty of 
 duties," he said. To tend him was to her a labour 
 of love, and consideration and attention from his 
 parents and himself was the result of duty done 
 with a heart-whole devotedness. I heard Mrs. 
 Stevenson say that one day, when driving from 
 Cummy's home, she had complained to Louis 
 that she had never had a printed tribute like 
 Cummy's. She reminded him that she too had 
 taken more than her share of the anxious night 
 
94 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 watches, and been as conscientious and adoring 
 a mother when he was Smoutie as when he 
 was R. L. S. the favoured author; but Louis 
 explained that her maternal love and self-sacrifice 
 went without saying, whereas Cummy's services 
 were bought. He considered she more than de- 
 served any laurels that he could lay on her brows. 
 In her case there was duty well done and also 
 a rich reward. 
 
 Cummy has a house on the south side of 
 Edinburgh, a cemetery, she says, in front of her 
 and a madhouse behind her, but her sunny par- 
 lour, like her heart, is full of mementos of Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. Mrs. Stevenson lately gave her 
 an album with a series of views of places and 
 people connected with their boy. Below each 
 photograph his mother had written a descriptive 
 quotation from his own works. There is Swanston 
 in its " bouquet of trees " ; there is a portrait of 
 him as he played at Colinton as " Little Smoutie 
 at the manse." Cummy likes to sit by visitors 
 as they turn over the leaves, and look at the 
 various pictures of that family trio with whom 
 she spent her best days. Her own portrait is 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 95 
 
 there, taken some years ago, and a quotation from 
 the Garden of Verses written by her mistress 
 below it. She was pleased, but shook a protesting 
 head, when an American visitor told her she was 
 like Mrs. Stevenson. But there was truth in it. 
 Alison's face is furrowed. She had not the calm, 
 smooth look and dignity of Mrs. Stevenson, but 
 her features are neatly chiselled and of a refined 
 type, like her mistress's. The tears dim her eyes 
 as she comes to the last page, where, among the 
 tangle of the rankly prolific vegetation of the 
 tropics, stands Louis's grave. He had looked at 
 that spot from his study window at Vailima, and 
 wrote of it " as my tomb which is to be," regretting, 
 while he praises its lavish Southern beauty, that 
 it was not to be his fate "to be buried in the 
 hills under the heather, and a table tombstone 
 like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers 
 are crying. My heart remembers how? Ah, by 
 God it does ! " Cummy has not that control over 
 her feelings which made many marvel at Mrs. 
 Stevenson's seeming placidness when speaking of 
 her sorrow. Cummy's eyes well over as she points 
 to a piece of moss, which Mrs. Stevenson brought 
 
96 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 her from that sacred spot. To be buried far from 
 Scotland and kin seems a terrible thing to Cummy, 
 and she lingers sadly over this last photo before 
 she lays the book down beside other keepsakes. 
 The child's mimic tea set stands on Cummy's 
 table. His aunt, Miss Balfour, gave it to him 
 and that it still survives tells how girlishly gentle 
 " little Smoutie " was. It has a tea-pot, cream-jug, 
 and sugar-bowl of Queen Anne shape > and three 
 cups on the tray, a dainty set all beflowered with 
 tiny pink roses. The cups hold " just a thimble- 
 ful," and many a one did his two mothers drink 
 at his tea parties, he playing various characters 
 in his role as host. 
 
 The walls are covered with pictures. Cummy 
 prizes one of Mentone, sent her and signed by 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. Mrs. Stevenson, Cummy, 
 and he had been there on a health pilgrimage. 
 It was Mrs. Stevenson who was the invalid that 
 winter. Leeches had been ordered for her, and 
 unawares, with others, a horse one had been 
 used, and had acted as a vampire. Cummy tells 
 how, uneasy about her mistress, she stole down 
 to her room at midnight and found her strength 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 
 
 97 
 
 far spent. For once Lew was neglected. ' He 
 wakened and found no Cummy to assure him, 
 nor did she come at his call. Cummy had 
 promptly flung the impostor leech into a fiery 
 grave, rung for help, and despatched a messenger 
 hot-foot to fetch the doctor. Lew, she said, 
 bawled loudly for his nurse, but she on this one 
 occasion let him bawl, for she feared that his 
 mother was going to slip away from them. Mr. 
 Stevenson returned next day from London, and, 
 " Honest man," says Cummy, " he was fair put 
 about, and as soon as Mrs. Stevenson was in a 
 fit state he packed Lew and she and I off for 
 eight months to France." Louis, on a visit to 
 Mentone many years after, sent this photograph 
 back to Cummy. " She will say," he wrote, " it's 
 no my Mentone, I ken by the biggin o't " ; for 
 houses had sprung up where nurse and child 
 had strolled hand in hand. 
 
 There is, in Cummy's parlour, a faded, old- 
 fashioned carte-de-visite album, pushed a little in 
 the background because of its shabby binding. 
 It is a mine of reminiscences. It has a series of 
 photographs of Louis from babyhood, and it is 
 
 7 
 
98 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 worth while to sit by Cummy and turn the worn 
 pages and listen to her comments as we scrutinize 
 the well-known face. The first is as an infant 
 on his mother's knee. He has laughed and not 
 kept his head still while hilarious, and it is 
 blurred. All the same, in spite of cheeks bulg- 
 ing with fatness, there is a likeness to the Robert 
 Louis Stevenson we knew, the wide-apart eyes 
 very bright and dark, and a certain sly, humorous 
 expression funny to see on the podgy baby when 
 we remember it in the lean-cheeked man. Cummy 
 likes the next photograph of him at twenty months 
 old (Mrs. Stevenson dated them all in her exact 
 way), for it was done after she had found her 
 life's work and been his nurse two months. He 
 is chubby cheeked, but his arms — which, after the 
 dangerous practice of that time, are bare — are 
 wanting in flesh. His fat hands are clasped, and 
 his sleek hair is smoothed over his big brow as 
 he gazes with earnest eyes, with a consequential 
 gravity, rather incongruous in a white-frocked, 
 be-sashed, plump-faced chit. Again at four he 
 is taken, twice in one day. In these two por- 
 traits he is dressed in very girlish fashion, for 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 99 
 
 in those days youths were not immediately 
 plunged into sailor suits. He is wearing a hat 
 which at first gives one the impression that the 
 child standing on the chair in the full-skirted 
 robe must be a lassie, for it is ostrich-plumed 
 and mushroom-shaped and tied under his chin — 
 the comfortable style of hat the Queen patronizes. 
 Altogether he is a refreshingly quaint figure. 
 He is dressed in a blue merino pelisse trimmed 
 with grey astrachan, and an Eastern scarf with 
 the Indian pine upon it keeps his throat warm. 
 "This pelisse," Cummy says, pausing as she 
 scrutinizes the picture, " was made of a remnant." 
 She mentions the shop which was selling off 
 when the bargain was offered. It is a name 
 which is in part extinct — one partner's name 
 still lives in a huge block of building in Princes 
 Street. To Cummy, in the face of its Whiteley- 
 like proportions, it is still the shop where Lew's 
 blue merino was bought. She is, however, rather 
 indignant that such a bairn should be dressed in 
 a remnant, however excellent the stuff. " Mrs. 
 Stevenson always bought the best, and made 
 things last," she said. " I've seen her myself in 
 
ioo R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 a dress I knew was years old looking better 
 dressed than anybody, for everything she had 
 was thorough to the linings." Evidently cloth 
 of gold was what Cummy would have robed 
 him in if she had had her way. She did not 
 think his father's pet name, Smout, was fitting for 
 her boy, and she tells how, when ladies asked him 
 what he was called, the little rascal would look up 
 with mischief in his face and answer " Smoutie." 
 " Like a name for a dog," his admirers said 
 indignantly, " only a dog might be Princie, and 
 a little Prince you are." Cummy quite agreed 
 with this, but Mr. Stevenson stuck to his original 
 Smout. The blue merino, remnant or not, she 
 owns suited her Prince well, and from under his 
 hat he glances up with the amused gleam that 
 lights up his face in his baby photograph. A 
 compatriot in years who knew him as a school- 
 boy and wrote of him so graphically in Temple 
 Bar, describes this expression which from first 
 to last was often on his face, yet impossible to 
 catch on canvas and difficult even for the quick 
 camera : " About the mouth and in the mirthful 
 mocking light of the eyes there lingered ever a 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 101 
 
 ready Autolycus roguery, that suggested sly 
 Hermes masquerading as a mortal. The eyes 
 were always genial, however gaily the lights 
 danced in them ; but about the mouth there was 
 something a little tricksy and mocking, as if a 
 spirit that had already peeped behind the scenes 
 of life's pageant and more than guessed its un- 
 realities." 
 
 The same day that he was immortalized in his 
 girlish headgear he was taken without this com- 
 fortable, queenly hat. The fun in this second 
 photograph has died out of his face, the joke 
 he was sniggling over had exploded. He is 
 staring at the no longer diverting photographer, 
 chubby, but serious. The next in the gallery 
 was taken when he was six and had begun to 
 shoot up into a lank boy. His hair is cropped 
 to a man-like shortness. Cummy needed no 
 longer to try and coax his fair locks into a curl 
 on his forehead, as was then the fashion. His 
 hair was fine for a boy and sleek, always lying 
 close to his head, for it was the hair belonging 
 to a delicate constitution, damp with the dews 
 of ill-health, and fell, when he wore it irrationally 
 
io2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 long for a man, in limp locks, giving him a 
 dishevelled look. In this picture, like most 
 photographs done in the fifties, he is leaning on 
 a table. There is a reproving seriousness in his 
 face; no droll conceit had crossed his mind to 
 bring to light that arch expression twice before 
 caught by the camera. His hands have lost 
 their baby podginess, and are nervous, long- 
 fingered. He has a whip in his grasp, which 
 falls slackly down as if toys were not in his 
 line, and he looks pensively ahead. Cummy 
 explains he is in a green poplin tunic, trimmed 
 with velvet. Miss Balfour says it is not green 
 poplin, and the velvet was scarlet ; but whatever 
 its colour, it is a tasteful, old-fashioned dress, 
 finished at the neck by a frill of madeira work, 
 which is fastened under the chin by a big 
 womanish bow. Cummy goes over every detail 
 with lingering fondness. She draws attention to 
 its good style. This time it is made of no 
 remnant, it is cut from a pattern blouse, and 
 was his party frock for a winter, and its chicness 
 of sleeve was specially admired. He has boots 
 on and white stockings, which need bracing up, 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 103 
 
 for they wrinkle over the fleshless legs. "See 
 his bit breekies," says Cummy, pointing to those 
 obsolete garments of white cotton appearing 
 below the short tunic. " That is tatting on them. 
 It was in his mother's trousseau, and real fine 
 tatting too." 
 
 In all these photographs of his first years we 
 can see the child is decidedly the father of the 
 man, and we can trace from the earliest one the 
 face of the famed author. The eyes are landmarks 
 which even the disguising puffiness of youth can- 
 not hide. In this album he seems to emerge 
 suddenly out of party frocks and white stockings 
 and tatting-trimmed " bit breekies " into common- 
 place tweeds. Cummy is no longer mistress of 
 the robes to his majesty King Louis. Her fingers 
 can only fashion him manly shirts and knit his 
 stockings. There is an honesty about these 
 schoolboy photographs which is assurance of 
 truth. There is no touching up, no flattering of 
 plain facts in them. In each he looks gloomily 
 thoughtful, almost sulky, or, as the language of 
 the North alone can describe it, " dour." Perhaps, 
 he was not captivated with the camera as of yore, 
 
io 4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 when his two mothers dressed him in all his 
 bravery, or the chairs he sat on may have been 
 too conventional, and the steadying prong which 
 held his head immovable, annoying ; for on none 
 of them is there a ghost of the quizzical specula- 
 tion which ever and anon shone out of his eyes- 
 and lurked round his mouth. There is a brood- 
 ing glumness in them all, which was unlike his 
 future nature. Maybe he already felt he had 
 to brave these equinoctial gales of youth, before 
 he settled into the groove for which he instinctively 
 felt he was best fitted. 
 
 There are other photographs of him on Cummy's 
 wall, cabinet size, which would not fit the now 
 out-of-date carte album. He is there be- 
 wigged as Robert Louis Stevenson, advocate, 
 and there is the suspicion of a playful duplicity 
 in the would-be wisdom-framed face. There is a 
 profile of him fresh from the Inland Voyage, a 
 pleasant reminiscence for those who knew him 
 at that time. His velvet coat and flannel shirt 
 with Byronic collar certainly look better on 
 paper than they did among his better-clothed 
 Edinburgh comrades. He has more the look of 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 105 
 
 his mother in this vignette than in any other, 
 except that in which, having " solved the great 
 mystery," he is lying at rest under his nation's 
 flag in the hall at Vailima, with his trusty Samoan 
 servant watching by his dead master like some 
 faithful dog. The first profile was taken when 
 he was in the heyday of such strength as was 
 accorded to him, and in both the well-defined 
 nose, the oval face recall Mrs. Stevenson. Yet 
 in another photograph this " lad o' pairts " seems 
 to be a Stevenson, and a very sullen one. He is 
 standing by his father, a boy of thirteen or so, 
 one hand resting on the good man's broad 
 shoulder, the other tucked into his pocket; an 
 angular boy, wanting in that naturalness of pose 
 which mark his photographs when a child. Mr. 
 Stevenson's Skye, a doormat of a terrier such as 
 Leech drew for Punch, is curled up beside him. 
 The engineer is sitting with that reliable look 
 of his in his firm face, his head turned at the 
 angle and his gaze fixed on the same object as 
 the thin boy's. The foreheads and the wide-apart 
 eyes of father and son are singularly alike, but 
 Mr. Stevenson's mouth is resolute yet tender, and 
 
io6 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 below it is a determined chin, while Louis has an 
 undecided fulness about the lips and has lowered 
 his head so that he looks almost chinless. " All 
 our other features are made for us, but a man 
 makes his own mouth," writes Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes. Louis's mouth in all these school- 
 boy photographs is unformed. When he merged 
 into a velveteen jacket and odd attire, a subtle, 
 incredulous smile settled on his lips, full of in- 
 terrogative wonderment. 
 
 There was little likeness between father and 
 son when the latter grew up, but that photograph 
 of Mr. Stevenson and Smoutie just caught an 
 affinity of look. Mr. Stevenson, broad of build, 
 square-faced, ruddy-coloured, with the strong yet 
 lenient compassionate lines about his firm-shut 
 mouth, seemed to have no relationship with the 
 ill-thriven, wan-faced, narrow-chested stripling, 
 and Louis never, even when beyond his twenties, 
 looked more than a boy in his teens. 
 
 Cummy points out with doubled interest the 
 photographs of her laddie her mistress loved the 
 best. Mrs. Stevenson, with a mother's instinctive 
 pride, fancied those which made him appear 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 107 
 
 strongest and straightest. Because of its emaci- 
 ated look she disliked even the photograph of one 
 of the too few portraits done of him from life. The 
 artist, Signor Nerli, while globe-trotting visited 
 Samoa, because he wished to see the author who 
 had made the coral-built island into a peopled 
 garden by his creative presence. The eyes in 
 this portrait are good. They have the droll 
 light in them which has a suspicion of satirical 
 amusement. He looks as if he were taking a 
 farcical survey of life, as if he agreed with Horace 
 Walpole, " If the angels have any fun in them, how 
 we must divert them ! " The travesty of life when 
 he thought over it gave him often this almost 
 cynical questioning expression. In this portrait, 
 which he sat for when very weary, there is a limp 
 listlessness sad to see, but painfully real. Often 
 when looking spare and fagged, but never com- 
 plaining, this droop of delicacy was terribly 
 apparent. There is too much of a sneer about 
 the mouth. The "tricksy mocking" expression 
 Mr. Baildon mentions exactly describes this doubt- 
 ing, incredulous look. Still it is a good likeness, 
 and many who knew Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
io8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 in his Edinburgh days remarked how it recalled 
 him to their minds. The best likeness of Louis, 
 in my opinion, is in the Edinburgh Edition, 
 volume xxi., " from an original kindly furnished 
 by Mr. John S. Sargent, A.R.A., a platinotype 
 enlargement from a roughly printed little amateur 
 photograph taken by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne in 1885." 
 The long oval face is there full front, and he is 
 looking up with those strangely wide-set eyes 
 of his, as if pausing a moment in thoughtful 
 doubt, pen in hand, before he jots down for us 
 some craftily worded observation, the very 
 prospect of which is bringing a smile to his lips. 
 The interrogatory but satisfied and bright look in 
 the eyes is altogether life-like. There is a good 
 likeness of him in the frontispiece of Vailima 
 Letters, etched by W. Strang, after a photograph 
 by Falk of Sydney, but to my thinking the eyes 
 in it are too round. Louis had eyes peculiar in 
 form. They were long, Japanese, almond- 
 shaped. People who have been laughing some- 
 times half shut their eyes, and Louis's gave one 
 the impression of eyes half-closed and beaming 
 with fun from their depths. "The old pythoness" 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 109 
 
 he speaks of, who told him his fortune, stopped 
 in her soothsaying, and looking at him exclaimed, 
 " Black eyes ! " This, he said, was not true, but 
 they were so dark as to be easily classed as 
 black. They were never sad, always radiant and 
 genial, as if brimful of life and sunshine. Judging 
 by the numerous photographs of him, beginning 
 from babyhood, he was constantly before the 
 camera's recording eye, though he seldom sat 
 to be immortalized on canvas. 
 
 Besides photographs of him in abundance in 
 Cummy's room, there is a line of his books 
 shoulder to shoulder on her shelf. 1 She has a 
 book-case at the end of her parlour, where many 
 volumes ousted from drawing-room favour, when 
 their outward gayness faded, and others given 
 her at Christmas, have now retired. Those on 
 the topmost shelf were all given to her by the 
 author, beginning with what Mrs. Stevenson used 
 to call her eldest grandson, namely a copy of 
 An Inland Voyage. In Cummy's copy, written 
 in a clear hand on its ribbed pages, is a private 
 
 1 Some of these she lately parted with. 
 
no R. L STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 foreword in prose of what was to appear later in 
 the Garden of Verses. 
 
 " My dear Cummy, — 
 
 " If you had not taken so much trouble with 
 me all the days of my childhood, this little book 
 would never have been written. Many a long 
 night you sat up with me when I was ill. I wish 
 I could hope, by way of return, to amuse a single 
 evening for you with my little book ! But what- 
 ever you may think of it, I know you will continue 
 to think kindly of 
 
 "The Author." 
 
 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes comes 
 next — " To Alison Cunningham, from the 
 Author." The Garden of Verses has its envied 
 dedication in print, but on her own copy is 
 " Alison Cunningham, Bournemouth, 1885, R. L. S.' 
 Others follow, Kidnapped, Underwoods, etc., all 
 to Cummy from "her boy, the Author," or "her 
 laddie, R. L. S." None have so precisely written 
 an inscription as An Inland Voyage. Like an 
 only child or a first-born, overweening care had 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM in 
 
 been bestowed upon it, and Louis's writing there 
 is a model of prim exactness. 
 
 Last on the row comes the posthumous Weir 
 of Hermiston, and on its title page, in Mrs. 
 Stevenson's writing, is "To Alison Cunningham, 
 in memoriam, Robert Louis Stevenson, from his 
 mother." Every one of his books sent by him- 
 self, Cummy had. She lent them to friends, 
 and, as is too often the fate with loaned books, 
 she lost them. Over these volumes, these photo- 
 graphs, some old letters, his baby caps worked 
 by his mother, Mrs. Stevenson and she used to 
 gloat with full hearts, Cummy's eyes glistening 
 with tears, Mrs. Stevenson composed and cheer- 
 ful. Cummy has letters her mistress wrote to 
 her when she went back for her holidays or to 
 nurse some of her sick kin at Torryburn. Mrs. 
 Stevenson was a faithful amanuensis. She wrote 
 down all Louis's babble, all his messages to 
 Cummy, while, like the guinea fowls he was 
 likened to later, he kept crying perpetually, 
 " Come back, come back." He knew by her 
 word pictures (for Cummy, like her mistress, has 
 the art of sketching people and scenes) every 
 
ii2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 one at Torryburn — a place he longed to visit 
 with his "Comely Cummy," as he called her. 
 At the end of one letter he signs himself, " Your 
 loving Robert Louis Stevenson," but fearing this 
 then seldom used title sounded stiff and estranged, 
 he ordered his mother between the " loving " and 
 his baptismal name to insert "little son,'' know- 
 ing these two short words would insure his 
 adopted mother's return. She has his hair in 
 an envelope beside these letters written from 
 Howard Place, and many stray memorials of her 
 laddie. A little red velvet Testament he gave 
 his mother on her birthday lies on Cummy's 
 table. He had borrowed two shillings from 
 Cummy for its purchase, and together they chose 
 it in gay scarlet and gold binding. Cummy 
 wrote his inscription in it, and for many a year 
 "Little Lew's Mamma" used it. 
 
 Cummy still wears crape on her dress for her 
 nursling — not ornamental sorrow, for his mother 
 and she wore their hearts upon their sleeves, and 
 he who ran might read engraven thereon the 
 name of their mutual little son Louis. This 
 crape Cummy will now never remove. She told 
 
ALISON CUNNINGHAM 113 
 
 her mistress, on the last visit she paid her, that 
 she had worn it over two years for her son. 
 "Don't take it off, Cummy," replied his mother, 
 touching it gently. Cummy has a hospitable 
 fashion of coming to the door to speed a part- 
 ing guest, watching them along the street, ready 
 to give an answering wave if they turn ; but 
 when her old mistress, grown by reason of long 
 acquaintance with a mutual love and mutual 
 sorrow into her best beloved confidante, came to 
 leave, Cummy always accompanied her to the 
 tramway car, loath to part with the friend of 
 forty-four years' standing. Mrs. Stevenson kissed 
 Cummy's sad, perturbed face, bade her go home 
 and not catch cold, and Alison Cunningham 
 stood looking lingeringly after her, till she turned 
 and kissed her hand and waved to her a re- 
 assuring farewell from the tramcar step. She 
 was always "wae" when her mistress left, but 
 that day little thought she would not meet her 
 again. Cummy enviously thinks of her meet- 
 ing with her laddie, but, drying her tears, she 
 smilingly adds, " It's not for long we'll be parted 
 now." 
 
Infant Days 
 
" The course of our education is answered best by these 
 poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous 
 atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious 
 characters.'' 
 
 — Books which have Influenced Me. 
 
 1.6 
 
L 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Infant Days 
 
 OUIS STEVENSON may well be con- 
 sidered a fortunate boy with his judicious 
 father and mother and that other "angel of his 
 infant life who made his childish days rejoice." 
 He was hedged round by love and care. He 
 had always, at least, one of his two mothers to 
 entertain him or to be an eager listener to all the 
 queer questions and thoughts which so throbbed 
 in his brain. His guardians had many tales to 
 tell ot their charge. He held despotic sway, 
 they firmly believed their king could do no 
 wrong, but from all facts gleaned he must have 
 been a well-behaved, seldom a troublesome little 
 chap. 
 
 If he had not been gifted with health, he had 
 an (inheritance which helped to balance the loss — 
 contentment. Sweet content and a zest in life 
 
 "7 
 
u8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 helped him thoroughly to appreciate the nursery 
 clime, even though he had to spend long months 
 in the Land of Counterpane. Weary months they 
 would have been to many, but looking back on 
 them with those searching eyes of his he could 
 truly call them "pleasant!' The cheerfulness and 
 patience of his two mothers flooded the dawn of 
 his life with sunshine, and the remembrance of 
 these palmy days was ever delectable to him, for 
 as Sydney Smith says, " If you make children 
 happy, you will make them happy twenty years 
 after by the memory of it." 
 
 One of his earliest recorded desires was to 
 write. When a petticoated boy, between three 
 and four, he slid his hand into his nurse's, 
 signalled to her to lock the door, put his finger 
 to his lips to enjoin secrecy, and then whispered 
 as loud as a stage conspirator, " I've got a story 
 to tell, Cummy — you write it." " He just 
 havered," says Cummy, smiling at the recollection 
 of the young author, whose eyes glowed so 
 darkly in contrast with his then childishly yellow 
 hair. Cummy entered sympathetically into the 
 conspiracy, and with barred doors the maker of 
 
INFANT DAYS n 9 
 
 tales dictated. " I wrote down every word he 
 told me," says his amanuensis. " It pleased the 
 bairn, and when he was asleep I read his havers 
 to his mamma by the nursery fire." These in- 
 fantile productions were all destroyed, but at six 
 he wrote a history which still survives.. His, 
 uncle, David Stevenson, offered a prize, open to 
 all the junior members of the family, for the 
 best essay on Moses. Louis was all agog to 
 compete. " But I can't write," he cried in sudden 
 despair. "You can dictate, and I will write," 
 said his mother ; " and not one word will be 
 put down but what you say, just as I write 
 letters for you." The child, flushed with excite- 
 ment, set to work on this his first real compo- 
 sition. These were the days when he wore the 
 green poplin tunic, and a pretty scene it must 
 have been, his fair young mother patiently waiting 
 till he had shaped all his conception of Moses 
 into sentences. To sit still was always foreign 
 to his mercurial nature, and when but six he 
 composed acting all the time the scenes and 
 characters. He drew childishly funny illus- 
 trations of the Israelites crossing the Red 
 
/ 
 
 / 
 
 120 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS / / 
 
 Sea, carrying very unwieldy portmanteaus, anc 
 smoking cigars of prodigious size. Despite the 
 illustrations he did not win the prize. As/ a 
 small boy his inclinations seemed to lean more 
 towards drama than literature. He liked to see 
 his puppets move. Paper puppets they were/ but 
 cut in human shape, and made to converse 
 according to his fancy. A Penny Plain and 
 Twopence Coloured tells of these "kaleidoscopes 
 of changing pictures " he so enjoyed. His pen, 
 like a wizard's wand, transports us to the en- 
 chanted past, to that Golden Age and brings us 
 within ken again of childhood's age of illusion. 
 
 During one winter when he was house-bound 
 he had a Stevenson cousin to bear him company. 
 They started a game of " islands." Robert Louis's 
 was " Noseingdale," Robert Alan's " Encyclo- 
 pedia." Great doings there were in these lands. 
 Foreign foes invaded them, and the islanders in 
 turn attacked other kingdoms. The two Roberts 
 vied with one another in inventing the most 
 electrifying or grisly news, or finding the strangest 
 monster on their property. R. L. Stevenson had 
 in his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, one whose 
 
 i 
 
INFANT DAYS 121 
 
 creative power bid fair to eclipse his own. So 
 Louis had to cudgel his brains to keep Noseing- 
 dale on a level with Encyclopedia. 
 
 Regiments of soldiers, when an invasion was 
 imminent, were dispatched by a friendly power 
 to assist Encyclopedia, and passed on the way 
 battalions bound for Noseingdale. Noah's Arks, 
 which had been cashiered as childish, were ran- 
 sacked and gave up antediluvian monsters to 
 prey on the inhabitants. Balloons, long before 
 St. Ives had to look on high for means of escape, 
 rescued Robert Louis Stevenson's heroes from 
 bewildering dilemmas on his "supposed" isle. 
 When not actively engaged, round the nursery 
 table, in making earthquakes or volcanoes shake 
 the islands to their foundation or in repelling the 
 assault of the numerous foes which warred against 
 them, the boys drew pictures of what went on 
 on their sorely afflicted dreamland properties. 
 Islands always had a fascination for Louis Steven- 
 son. They were so handy for an ambush or 
 a pillaging ground for pirates. It is a pity that 
 a few copies of The Encyclopedia Budget or Nose- 
 ingdale Daily News were not preserved. There 
 
122 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 was not a dull day spent by the rival islanders, 
 for their rulers kept them in a red-hot ferment 
 between subterranean upheavals, bloody battles, 
 dragons, and revolutions requiring martial inter- 
 ference. . 
 
 Indeed, to their creators and the creators' 
 guardians they were Treasure Islands, for the in- 
 calculable amusement they afforded was worth 
 a mint of money when chimney-corner days 
 were the doctor's orders. This kindred spirit, 
 Robert Alan, was the cousin alluded to who, 
 when he grew up, developed the same objection 
 to the strait waistcoat of convention as Louis did, 
 and proved that the latter took his uncontrollable 
 Bohemianism from the seemingly staid Stevensons. 
 They were well matched as boys, having both 
 a rich gift of imagination. In Child Play 
 Louis mentions how he used to bury his por- 
 ridge under sugar and pretend it was a land 
 smothered under snow, while Bob submerged his 
 bicker of meal under milk, while they exchanged 
 views as to how the blizzard or the inundation 
 progressed. Such proceedings seasoned plain fare 
 into an appetising banquet. 
 
INFANT DAYS 123 
 
 Louis certainly had one great advantage in the 
 springtime of his life; for, to use his own ex- 
 pression, he had been "young in youth." When 
 years had winged their flight, he could recall 
 every detail of his childish play, and not only 
 that, but so indelibly was it engraved on his 
 tenacious memory, so dexterous his pen, that he 
 was able to wake in his readers the long-forgotten 
 charm, the queer imaginings of their nursery days. 
 While Cummy or his mother read, he always 
 pranced about, for he marvelled how his elders 
 could calmly sit and retail adventures. He had 
 to make the chairs into heroes, the coal box into 
 a castle which held the captives, the table into 
 an enchanted island which was reached in an 
 inverted stool, the rocking chair into the horse 
 which galloped madly with him to bear news 
 of battle. He had always to enact a fight, with 
 a pillow for his adversary, or storm a supposed 
 citadel, and personally lead the van. When he 
 stood breathless brushing his hair back from 
 his overheated brow, Cummy looked anxiously on 
 her agitated laddie and begged of him to " Sit 
 down and bide quiet for a bittie." She would 
 
i2 4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 rack her brains to find some story not needing 
 much action on the part of the hero, or coax 
 him to knit a garter which he remembered grimed 
 with the age it attained while growing under 
 his 'prentice hand. 
 
 Some cousins of his have not forgotten how, 
 when this only child came to play with them, 
 his brain fomenting with unexpressed ideas, he 
 at once set to work to utilize their nursery full 
 of children, for to have other small people to 
 make believe with was a fine chance of fun for 
 him. He drilled them into opposing armies. He 
 transformed them into pirates or moss-troopers, 
 and from one pursuit to another his nimble im- 
 agination flew, and he made them execute his 
 designs while he staged his properties. He left 
 his companions exhausted by the many parts they 
 had played, while he yet saw possibilities for 
 another live scenic display. He continued to ex- 
 pound his plot volubly, his ashen cheeks rosy, until 
 he was waylaid by Cummy, who conveyed the 
 excited child home, dreading lest he should 
 pay the penalty for this over exertion by a 
 sleepless night. 
 
INFANT DAYS 125 
 
 When the last embers died from the sunset, 
 if Louis were not in bed he peered into the 
 wintry gloaming, waiting for the lamplighter. As 
 Louis watched " for the term of his twilight dili- 
 gence," when he had knocked " another luminous 
 hole in the dusk," like many another in the city 
 he repeated the old doggerel jingle which helped 
 the genius of the Lamp on his way, beginning — 
 "Leerie, Leerie, light the lamp." Louis, in the 
 Garden of Verses, tells us he considers his father's 
 house is happily situated, for he boasts he had 
 " a lamp before his door." When that home light 
 was lit the child rattled on the pane, or if he 
 caught the man's eye kissed his hand to him. 
 Louis went through paroxysms of apprehension 
 for fear that the man of light would forget the 
 white-faced watcher who longed to salute him, 
 for he pathetically begs, — 
 
 "And O ! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, 
 O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night ! " 
 
 Louis quickly learned to recite, and knew the 
 
 metrical psalms and his Shorter Catechism sooner 
 
 than most. He tells how he repeated " I to the 
 
 hills will lift mine eyes " to his grandfather, 
 
126 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 hoping with one of those serio-comic aspirations 
 of childhood that the good divine would award 
 him an Indian picture on which his eyes had 
 been covetously cast. Anything pronouncedly 
 gay in colour fixed the attention of the boy, 
 whose eyes dancing with light seemed to have 
 absorbed the benediction of the sun. "Nothing 
 was more unlikely than that my grandfather 
 should strip himself of one of those pictures, love- 
 gifts and reminders of his absent sons," says 
 Louis, recalling this scene. Something in the 
 lad's demeanour touched his kinsman, and break- 
 ing through his usual reserve, he took the little 
 fellow up and kissed him. It speaks well for 
 young Louis's responsiveness of heart that, forget- 
 ting his disappointment about the gaudy-coloured 
 picture, he was " struck by this reception into 
 so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappoint- 
 ment." 
 
 The twenty-third Psalm gave him food for play, 
 and he had his own localities in which to see 
 and enact it. The pastures green he decided 
 were some fields bordering a road near Howard 
 Place, known as Puddocky. The Water of Leith 
 
INFANT DAYS 127 
 
 running below a bridge forms a deep pool over- 
 hung by some willows. Seagulls go there and 
 float, on the heavy still days preceding a storm, 
 white creamy dots on the chocolate-coloured 
 water. There were sheep in those willow- fringed 
 fields awaiting the butcher's knife. These were 
 to Louis the flocks which the good shepherd 
 tended. " Death's dark vale " for him was also 
 on this road. It was a tunnel below a railway 
 bridge, and has to be passed through before 
 Warriston Cemetery is reached. Surrounded by 
 graves, a few stunted pines like hearse plumes 
 hiding the bank, the dank, drippy tunnel is rather 
 a fearsome passage for children to face. Louis, 
 however, with a tall rod in one hand and a 
 crook-headed staff in the other, stepped boldly 
 through this lugubrious entrance, but he liked, 
 all the same, to hear Cummy's steps behind him. 
 He rejoiced when he got out into the full light, 
 and supported by the staff (Cummy carrying the 
 improvised rod till the return journey) he marched 
 along "fearing none ill." He played through 
 life on the skirts of death. About the verge of 
 the valley of the shadow his feeble steps seemed 
 
i 2 8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 always to hover, but he looked down into the 
 unfathomed depths smilingly and inquisitively. 
 His rod and staff throughout his life was a 
 readiness to meet his fate with lips and eyes 
 full of hopeful sunlight. In his last Evensong 
 he says he understands — • 
 
 " So far have' I been led, Lord, by Thy will ; 
 
 So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still. 
 * * * * * 
 
 The night at Thy command comes. 
 
 I will eat and sleep and will not question more." 
 
 " ' Be good yourself, make others happy,' was," his 
 mother said, writing those lines of his on a quilt, 
 " the gospel according to Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 Along with the psalms Cummy drilled into 
 him the Shorter Catechism. The questions and 
 answers learned by rote remained firmly implanted 
 in his mind, as they do in that of every Scot 
 who had learned it in youth. But Louis, medita- 
 tive and inquisitive, must have puzzled his green 
 brains over the meanings of these well-planned 
 sentences he learned with parrot-like exactness. 
 Cummy told me she read to him MacCheyne; 
 "just bits he'd understand, you know." Her 
 
INFANT DAYS 129 
 
 laddie mentions this MacCheyne without much 
 respect. He had evidently too much of this 
 author on the strictly kept Sabbath, which he 
 says made a " grim and serviceable pause in the 
 tenor of Scotch boyhood days of great stillness 
 and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the 
 dearth of books and play, and in the intervals of 
 studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and 
 senses prey upon and test each other." He pre- 
 ferred the Pilgrim's Progress and its woodcuts, 
 and tales from Fox's Book of Martyrs, of those 
 who were loyal to death to "Christ's ain kirk 
 and covenant." Cummy thinks she read the 
 Bible three or four times through to him before 
 he could read, so with his keen memory he must 
 have started life mighty in the Scriptures. Some 
 passages as a child fastened on his memory. 
 The words, "The only son of his mother, and 
 she was a widow," he kept murmuring, varying 
 the intonations of pity he threw into his voice. 
 Joseph and his brethren was a story he liked to 
 re-tell, and Cummy writes : " With a very serious 
 face he would repeat the story of the Shunammite 
 in 2 Kings iv. The twenty-fourth verse he used 
 
 9 
 
1 3 o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 to dwell on with great emphasis, especially the 
 middle clause to end of verse." The fifty-eighth 
 of Isaiah, his nurse informed me, was "Lew's 
 chapter " ; and when he had acquired the mastery 
 of print, he read it to her. " I think I hear him 
 yet," she says. It was a curious chapter to fix a 
 child's attention. There is, however, in the sixth, 
 seventh, and eighth verses the rough outline of the 
 "gospel according to Robert Louis Stevenson," as 
 his mother said, or rather the gospel as practised 
 by him. Cummy tells how when, after his mar- 
 riage, " her laddie " was spending a summer at 
 Pitlochrie, he rushed out on a man who was 
 unmercifully beating a dog. " It's no yours, is 
 it ? " said the owner. " No, but it's God's dog, and 
 I won't have it beaten," replied Louis, remember- 
 ing " the part he had chosen," " to loose the bands 
 of Wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to 
 let the oppressed go free." 
 
 Certainly, between his two mothers and the 
 family theologian, he was what in Scotland would 
 have been called " weel brocht up," which included 
 a thorough grounding of Presbyterian precepts. 
 Those who knew him in after years, kicking 
 
INFANT DAYS i 31 
 
 violently against the pricks of civilization, scoffing 
 at the dogmatism in every creed, especially of the 
 one he had been reared in, could hardly have 
 pictured the strictness of his up-bringing. When 
 he was far away from the old land, waves of re- 
 collections of the teachings he received in his 
 youth came surging over him. With Thackeray 
 he could say : — 
 
 " If in time of sacred youth 
 
 We learned at home to love and pray, 
 Pray Heaven that early Love and Truth 
 May never wholly pass away.'' 
 
 His father we know preached a capital lay- 
 man's sermon. His son preached a Christmas 
 one, and with him example also went before 
 precept. " Kind deeds and words — that's the true 
 blue piety; to hope the best, and do the best, 
 and speak the best," wrote Louis. Cheerfulness 
 was another doctrine he believed in. "Give us 
 to go blithely on our business," he prayed of a 
 morning. " Help us to play the man ; help us to 
 perform the petty round of irritating concerns .and 
 duties with laughter and kind faces ; let cheerful- 
 ness abound with industry." 
 
i 3 2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 The land of story-books was to him in child- 
 hood his favourite pleasure-ground. Through the 
 sleepless nights, the days in bed, when he had 
 his toys about him, and sent his leaden army 
 marching among the bed-clothes, "through the 
 hills," and his fleets " all up and down among the 
 sheets," he liked to be read to. " Cummy, read to 
 me from the Bible,'' he would order when he could 
 not sleep, and Cummy obeyed, till rest came to 
 him. In the morning when he awoke he would 
 again issue his standing order : " Read to me, 
 Cummy." His nurse, knowing well that his fears, 
 with the shadows of night, had flown away, and 
 the " Old, old story " would be laid aside till he 
 again traversed the " uneven land," would ask with 
 well-pretended ignorance, "What chapter will I 
 read to you, my laddie ? " But his fears dispelled 
 by the rising sun, Louis no longer a. saint would 
 be, and with the uncanting honesty of tender 
 years, answered, " Why, Cummy, it's daylight 
 now ; put away the Bible, and reach over for 
 that new book of Ballantyne's." He speaks of 
 some of the magnified, often unspoken, fears of 
 childhood. " We no longer see the devil in the 
 
INFANT DAYS 133 
 
 bed-curtains, nor lie awake to listen to the wind." 
 These are compensations for the shades of the 
 prison-house closing in on him. Cared for as 
 he was, bogles, darkness, the fears of traversing 
 the north-west passage, terrified him — the highly- 
 strung child, full of emotions. Cummy found him 
 one night, when beset with fears, kneeling, pray- 
 ing for the Holy Ghost to come and comfort him, 
 and finding his qualms not allayed, he bitterly 
 complained that no " peace of God " came at his 
 asking to soothe his fevered frame. He liked, as 
 a child, the " rare and welcome silence of the 
 snows." Cummy would lift him up out of bed, 
 and draw aside the blind to show him the world 
 in white. 
 
 But when the spring days came, his playground 
 was oftener the manse garden than the nursery. 
 His mother liked to see him running in the 
 garden she had romped in, and showed him 
 where to secrete himself, or hunted for him when 
 he was a wee four-year-old hider in the French 
 merino pelisse. He would snicker with sup- 
 pressed delight when Mrs. Stevenson and Cummy 
 went peering about, and never saw the obviously 
 
i 3 4 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 hidden child till he rushed out at them, jubilant 
 at his successful deception. "These days were 
 like green spots in my memory," says Cummy, 
 thinking of him singing by the water door, " How 
 far is it to Babylon ? " Having transformed the 
 garden into every conceivable land recorded in 
 the atlas or fairy-books, hob-nobbed with Bruce 
 and Tell and Ali Baba, he and his two friends, 
 after a thousand-mile gallop, for the finish of the 
 day, at 
 
 "Last drew rein— a weary three — 
 Upon the lawn in time for tea, 
 And from our steeds alighted down 
 Before the gates of Babylon." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson and Cummy going over these 
 times, talking of Smoutie at the manse, remem- 
 bered not the sad but only the happy days of 
 yore, when they hoped little Lew was going to 
 grow up well and strong. But whether he was 
 condemned to the Land of Counterpane, on 
 chimney-corner days or garden days, he saw 
 something bright in all. 
 
 " The world is so full of a number of things, 
 I am sure we should all be as happy as kings," 
 
INFANT DAYS 135 
 
 he sang. He was petted, not spoilt. He lived in 
 a world of admiration, and he imagined every 
 one, like his home circle, was his bounden slave. 
 He liked playing chieftain in Samoa. He was 
 lord of all he surveyed in Howard Place ; his 
 words listened to, his whims pandered to. He 
 was an uncommonly happy-natured, happy-starred 
 small boy. 
 
Schooldays 
 
" Give me again all that was there ; 
 Give me the sun that shone ; 
 Give me the eyes, give me the soul 
 Give me the lad that's gone. 
 * * * * 
 
 Glory of youth glowed in his soul. 
 Where is that glory now ? " 
 
 — Song's of Travel. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 Schooldays 
 
 LOUIS began his schooldays when he was 
 eight. While still in tunics, more on account 
 of a notion of his own than from any wish of 
 the rulers of his infant days to push him on, 
 he thirsted to go to school. He looked out of 
 his window and saw the little lads and lasses 
 trotting home from lessons, very purposeful in 
 their gait, or romping and merry. He wistfully 
 eyed them, begged to join their ranks, to run 
 along with a satchel of books, or drive four- 
 in - hand teams of cravat - harnessed fellow- 
 scholars home before him. His entrance as a 
 pupil at Mr. Henderson's preparatory school, 
 which was then near to Louis's second home, 
 No. i, Inverleith Place, was delayed till he 
 had grown out of his green poplin tunic, and 
 
140 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 both the Stevensons and Mr. Henderson had 
 moved uphill nearer Princes Street. Louis had 
 lived three years at Howard Place, and four 
 at its opposite neighbour ; then 17, Heriot Row, 
 became his fixed Edinburgh abode. Shortly after 
 settling there he had an attack of gastric fever. 
 There is an autobiographic glimpse of this illness 
 in one of his poems, " The Sick Child." The 
 fevered boy, tossing restlessly, begs assurance from 
 his mother that the looming shapes seen by his 
 delirious eye do not mean him ill. The mother, 
 hiding her anxiety, explains to him the darkness 
 will not harm him, for there are 
 
 "Nothing but lamps the whole town through, 
 And never a child awake but you. 1 ' 
 
 How often then did Mrs. Stevenson gladly hail 
 the first glimmer of dawn when her vigil ended. 
 Knowing that soon the sun must shine blue on 
 the window blind, she tells her son, — 
 
 " Out in the city sounds begin ; 
 Thank the kind God the carts come in; 
 Then shall my child go sweetly asleep, 
 And dream of the birds and the hills of sheep." 
 
 In Nuits Blanches, an early paper, he again re- 
 
SCHOOLDAYS i 4 r 
 
 calls that weary time: "If any one" should know the 
 pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it should 
 be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child 
 that woke from his few hours' slumber with the 
 sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie awake, 
 and listen, and long for the first signs of life 
 among the silent streets. Over the black belt 
 of the garden I saw the long line of Queen 
 Street, with here and there a lighted window. 
 How often my nurse lifted me out of bed and 
 pointed them out to me, while we wondered 
 together if, there also, there were children that 
 could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were 
 signs of those that waited, like us, for the morning. 
 It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to 
 repeat the question, 'When will the carts come 
 in ? ' and repeat it again and again. The road 
 before our house is a great thoroughfare for early 
 carts. I know not, and I never have known, 
 what they carry, whence they come, or whither 
 they go. But I know that, long ere dawn and 
 for hours together, they stream continuously past. 
 It was not for nothing they made the burthen of 
 my wishes all night through. They were really 
 
142 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day. 
 You can hear the carters cracking their whips 
 and crying hoarsely to their horses, or to one 
 another ; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, 
 harsh, horse laughter comes up to you through 
 the darkness. There is now an end to mystery 
 and fear." 
 
 This illness withheld him from being enrolled as 
 one of Mr. Henderson's pupils, but eventually he 
 was strong enough, and like many another Edin- 
 burgh citizen, eminent to-day, he was well 
 grounded there. India Street was very close 
 to Heriot Row, but Louis's uncertain health kept 
 him from continuous attendance. Near as this 
 seminary for small boys and girls was to his doors, 
 the regularity of the routine began to gall the 
 young student before the corners of his multi- 
 plication card were well dog-eared, and the new- 
 ness gone from his neatly covered primers. He 
 never took a prominent place in his classes, or 
 Cummy would have had an array of his prizes on 
 her shelves to-day, arrayed beside a book Mrs. 
 Stevenson won at school. Louis followed on his 
 good father's lines, and studied only what he 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 143 
 
 liked, worked only in his own way. Cummy's 
 constant Bible readings (and the long night 
 watches gave ample time for such) must of them- 
 selves have been a liberal education. Making his 
 paper puppets act, inventing deedful days on 
 Noseingdale, and having stories read to him, filled 
 up his winter school days more than regular 
 lessons. The fancy for school quickly palled. 
 He found he could not romp as his sturdy 
 comrades did, and they refused to be drilled 
 into highwaymen or Indians as he wished. Then, 
 near as school was, he had to go tied to Cummy's 
 apron-strings, for if it were wet or cold she 
 "changed his feet," as she said, for fear of a 
 chill. The others, with the candid cruelty of 
 children, jeered at their molly-coddled companion, 
 jeers which stung the thin-skinned Louis severely. 
 His conversation, which amused his elders and 
 later his contemporaries, was not congenial to 
 his small schoolmates. The gilt was soon rubbed 
 off the delights of school. 
 
 But a good mother is the best of teachers, 
 and he, having two at his disposal, stowed away 
 a deal of knowledge. The books Cummy read 
 
144 R- L- STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 him she says she, too, enjoyed heartily. She 
 had a leaning to Ballantyne, in preference to 
 Cooper or Mayne Reid. He had a reader in 
 sympathy with his taste, for his slave loved her 
 task. 
 
 He rubbed against other young folk in the 
 manse garden, but like his schoolmates they were 
 not to his mind. He was too rashly eager to 
 win his spurs when playing " French and English," 
 too eager to dash over the boundary to gain 
 loot or rescue a prisoner. His physical strength 
 was not equal to the tasks he set himself, and 
 he was captured by the enemy and upbraided 
 across the border by his countrymen for headlong 
 stupidity. The other boys were too rude and 
 hardy for Louis. He liked better to watch " the 
 gardener at his toil," or play with girl cousins, 
 who were diverted with the frail child, and found 
 his polite, considerate manners a pleasing change. 
 In the manse garden he was hero, patriot or 
 robber, till, wearied of play, he sauntered off 
 to listen to the moil of the mill. Summer and 
 Colinton were synonymous to him. But the 
 " herd of men " ended his duties, and the manse 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 145 
 
 sheltered a stranger race, so the Stevensons spent 
 some summers at the seaside, where Louis went 
 "Crusoeing" — a word, he says, "which covers all 
 extempore eating in the open air." North Berwick 
 was then not so villafied a place as now, and 
 he wandered around tasting of an adventurous 
 gean, whose hardihood to grow on the salt-en- 
 crusted cliffs in the teeth of searching winds 
 commanded his respect. He lunched at Tantallon 
 on " sandwiches and visions " — visions of Marmion 
 or Douglas in that hold. His cousin tells that 
 "games of pirates played in the open were a 
 constant source of amusement among the sand 
 wreaths to the west of North Berwick, where 
 we were wont to play together, and the explora- 
 tion of old castles and ruins was one of his 
 greatest pleasures." 
 
 Another year he spent an autumn at 
 Peebles. Though ffail of frame he was full 
 of spirit, and many romantic and historic 
 scenes he imagined, and was fain, when strength 
 and chance allowed, to enact. At Peebles Louis 
 had a pony, and his two companions were also 
 mounted. He christened their steeds in rather 
 
 10 
 
146 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 a startling manner. The girl's snow-white palfrey, 
 a safe mount fitted to carry a somewhat timid 
 rider, was Heaven. Her brother's black steed 
 was Hell ; and his own, being a midway colour, 
 was Purgatory. The boys loved to ford the 
 Tweed, and were always choosing roads which 
 led them across the river. No sooner were they 
 over, than despite the protests of Heaven's rider, 
 they would change their route and return by the 
 watery way. Some days Louis bade them assume 
 they were moss-troopers out a-rieving, and every 
 flock of sheep they met doucely coming from 
 market, they uproariously hailed as their spoil. 
 Other times they played at being pursued by 
 the English, and were forced to fly full speed 
 for the shelter of their own peel tower. Louis 
 foresaw an ambush in every broomy scaur which 
 had to be dashed past. Heaven, who disliked 
 this erratic pace, lagged, and forthwith became 
 a wounded comrade, whom chivalry forbade them 
 to desert. The boys loved to gallop through the 
 toll bars, pretending they were running a block- 
 ade ; but the girl, being of a law-abiding nature, 
 was anxious to pay tax, and soothed the toll- 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 
 
 147 
 
 keeper's wrath, as he shook his fist at the black 
 and brown pony riders, jeering at his defeat. 
 When, wearied of being caterans, or the stragglers 
 from that fatal Flodden, they raced along the 
 Queen's highway, Louis shouted, " Hell wins, I 
 say ; don't hold Heaven in, you stupid. No ; I 
 believe Purgatory will beat you both." The 
 visitors that summer at Peebles must have often 
 met this capering trio, led by the spare-framed 
 boy on the brown, who, with face inflamed 
 by excitement, resurrected many a bygone bor- 
 derer, and fought their battles over again. 
 
 In winter he found much to explore round his 
 native city. Craigleith quarry, within a mile 
 of Edinburgh town, attracted him on holidays, 
 for its hillocks tufted with gorse, the green water 
 far in the abyss, made fine exploring ground. 
 Then the " stones chattered to him," and told him 
 tales of long ago — of villages now swept away, 
 or a house with old trees around it, wedged into 
 a street, was a story to him. Many a red-tiled 
 "nugget of cottages," spared by the encroaching 
 town, did Louis discover when he was a school- 
 boy. "The memories of an Edinburgh boy are 
 
i 4 8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 partly the memories of the town. I look 
 back," he says, " with delight on many an 
 escalade of garden walls, many a ramble among 
 lilacs full of piping birds, many an exploration 
 in obscure quarters that were neither town nor 
 country ; and I think that both for my companions 
 and myself there was a special interest, a point 
 of romance and a sentiment of foreign travel 
 when we hit in our excursions on the butt end 
 of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic 
 cottages embedded among streets and squares." 
 
 He was eight or more before he took to reading 
 to himself. With a slave at command to read 
 when he wished, he had no need to hurry him- 
 self to learn, precocious as he was at mastering 
 words in print. But the thirst for knowledge 
 was strong within him. His constant cry was, 
 " Tell me more." Cummy ransacked her brains 
 for further tales from out the storied past where- 
 with to amuse him. Louis's wife wrote Alison 
 Cunningham lately that Louis had told her he 
 liked his nurse's narrations more than any book 
 she read to him. But his appetite was insatiable, 
 and he was often baffled by being told, in answer 
 
SCHOOLDAYS i 49 
 
 to questions, that when he grew clever he would 
 read for himself and find out. The spirit of 
 inquiry strong within him spurred the lagging 
 schoolboy on. One evening "of heavenly sweet- 
 ness," deserted by his companion with whom he 
 had been building sand castles, he went at sun- 
 set among the firs, a book of fairy tales in his 
 hand, and began to read to himself as he strolled. 
 Then, he says, he knew he loved reading. 
 Cummy's favourite, McCheyne, was left in the 
 lurch. He found his mother had been educating 
 his taste, and, though his father's library was a 
 place of "some austerity," he found there life- 
 long friends. Four old volumes of Punch he 
 revelled in, and he was astonished to find in after- 
 life that the " Snob Papers " were written by big 
 Mr. Thackeray, and not by the hook-nosed, de- 
 formed humorist, Mr. Punch. He also tasted of 
 the Master of Romance's Guy Mannering and Rob 
 Roy, and new worlds of entertainment opened 
 up. The Arabian Nights he read, he says, "in the 
 fat, old, double-columned volumes with the prints. 
 I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, 
 I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a 
 
iSo R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. 
 I grew blind with terror ; but instead of ordering 
 the book away he said he envied me. Ah ! well 
 he might!" 
 
 During his tedious convalescence after the 
 fever he consumed a deal of literature. He was 
 read to, of course. " I listened for news of the 
 great, vacant world, upon whose edge I stood ; 
 I listened for delightful plots that I might re- 
 enact in play, and romantic scenes and circum- 
 stances that I might call up before me, with 
 closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland and 
 home, and that weary prison of the sick chamber 
 in which I lay so long in durance." Robinson 
 Crusoe, Mayne Reid, and a book called Paul 
 Blake, were his favourite peeps beyond that 
 sunny room at Heriot Row. When he learned 
 to enjoy reading to himself, he was like a sheep 
 long pent in a small fold, turned into endless 
 and rich pastures to browse at will. It was then 
 his education really began. 
 
 In 1863 he was enrolled as an Academy boy 
 in one of the biggest and best Edinburgh day 
 schools, a junior rival to the High School where 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 151 
 
 Scott was educated. Louis was at first proud of 
 his advancement. The school lay down hill from 
 his home, and he ran off to his task, rasping his 
 clacken * on the area railings as he went, a noisy 
 trick he afterwards made a hero of his indulge 
 in. Louis's clacken was only worn by this 
 rasping. He did not join the outdoor pursuits 
 of the boys. The playfield near by with the 
 green mound marking where the bow butts had 
 stood in days of yore saw little of him. Even 
 the yard round the school, where clackens were 
 put to their orthodox use in brief play intervals, 
 had no attractions for him. He cared for none of 
 the games with which the active boys filled their 
 leisure, so he was little known by his contempor- 
 aries. When he wanted exercise he strolled 
 alone, and as the houses spoke to him he was 
 not so solitary as he seemed. The Academy is 
 close to Silvermills, where Davie Balfour met 
 Alan Breck before they made a dash for the sea, 
 where they heard what Louis himself calls that 
 
 1 The clacken is a wooden racket dear to Academy boys, 
 and usually carried in the other hand from their books 
 handy for amusement or war. 
 
iS2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 piece of living Scots — the story of Tod Lapraik 
 and his fiendish dance on the Bass Rock. Silver- 
 mills once saw the precious ore which gives it 
 its name melted in a mill on the humble Water 
 of Leith, and a village sprang up to support its 
 workers. To Louis, who passed by it on his 
 schooldays, it was not an uninteresting suburb 
 of temporary sheds and workmen's flats, but a 
 little community far from the city. "Besouth 
 of the mill-lade in a scrog of wood," where St. 
 Stephen's church now stands, Louis's hero and 
 part namesake found " the place and the hour 
 and the talking of the water infinitely pleasant." 
 The mill-lade, bickering and surging busily, was 
 often viewed by a tardy schoolboy, and before 
 his eyes the unsightly houses and yards faded, 
 and he saw it as it used to be when the silver 
 from " God's Blessing " mine was worked into 
 shape there. Out in Samoa he remembered what 
 he had conjured of its past when passing at a 
 dawdling pace to his studies, wondering what 
 the place had looked like before the old town 
 had become too small for Edinburghers. Quite 
 unconsciously then he relished the pleasure he 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 153 
 
 depicts in his Dedication to Catriona, of follow- 
 ing " among named streets and numbered houses 
 the country walks of David Balfour." Some- 
 times, wearying of passing St. Stephen's daily, he 
 would go to the westernmost end of Heriot Row 
 and trot down Church Lane and imagine it again 
 a thorn-edged loaning, leading from Stockbridge 
 to the West Kirk. He never forgot these talks 
 with the past, and he could minutely chronicle 
 everything his eyes had lit on when a boy. His 
 " Misadventures of John Nicholson," which 
 appeared in a Christmas number, Yule Tide, 
 illustrates this. It owes its reappearance in the 
 Edinburgh edition to Mr. Foulis, of Messrs. 
 Douglas & Foulis, Edinburgh, who reminded 
 the editors of its existence. Its wonderful local 
 colour had made a 'deep impression on him. 
 Louis locates John Nicholson's house on the 
 south, the dull, side of Randolph Crescent. 
 The north side has a wide outlook to the Forth, 
 but John's dreary home is put in a sunles 
 corner. Louis did not forget the crows who 
 built in the crescent garden, as their ancestors 
 had done when their tree-top nurseries were in 
 
iS4 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the wood of Drumsheugh. In this story of John 
 Nicholson there is a murder, out at Murrayfield. 
 Mr. Baildon — whose recollections of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson as a schoolboy in for Temple Bar, March, 
 1895, I have already quoted — read the story in 
 Yule Tide, and identified his house as the scene 
 of this tragedy. Murrayfield, being out of town, 
 had, on Saturdays, attractions for the schoolboys, 
 Louis remembered it, and painted it as it would 
 seem on a dreary night, not as a happy holiday 
 house. Mr. Baildon, entering into correspondence 
 with his friend, who had then journeyed to Samoa, 
 reminded Louis Stevenson that he had been so 
 unkind as to leave a dead body in the Murray- 
 field dining-room. As it was long since he and 
 Louis had met, he said he thought the least the 
 author of the crime could do by way of atone- 
 ment was to come back to Edinburgh, not only 
 to give them an opportunity of renewing their 
 intercourse, but to give Louis the opportunity 
 of removing the haunting corpse he had deposited 
 on his friend's hearth. This last imperative 
 reason for his return mightily tickled the fancy 
 of R. L. S. in Samoa. 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 15s 
 
 One amusement Louis entered into at the 
 Academy. That was the starting of a school 
 magazine in which he had an editorial interest. 
 The Sunbeam, as it was called, was a manu- 
 script magazine. If some one came across this 
 collection of the editor's blood and murder con- 
 tributions, written in his boyish hand, what a find 
 it would be ! Louis, as usual, when riding a 
 hobby, was in thorough earnest over it. The 
 other contributors fell off, or did not circulate 
 the one copy, but he stuck to it with determined 
 diligence. There was one number with a 
 coloured illustration in it, a portrait of one of his 
 cousins in lesson hours, his tasks pushed on 
 one side, blissfully ignorant of the presence of 
 a master who, tawse in hand, is looking over 
 the boy's shoulder. 
 
 Louis never took any forward place in his 
 classes. His health kept him a not unwilling 
 victim at home. Then, health again sent him 
 and his mother abroad in the spring. Even in 
 summer he was irregular in his attendance, for 
 the family was often away from town, and Louis 
 found crusoeing more instructive than journeying 
 
156 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 by an early train to school. For a short time 
 he was at a boarding-school near London, but 
 his father passing through on his way to Mentone 
 removed Louis, and together they journeyed to 
 join Mrs. Stevenson in the Riviera. Mr. Steven- 
 son was wont to say he preferred his son to 
 grow up a healthy idiot rather than a sickly 
 genius, so Louis's boarding-school experiences 
 were decidedly brief. 
 
 From 1 864 to 1867 he attended a Mr. Thomson's 
 school, of which Mr. Baildon, who met Louis 
 there, says, " I do not think there were at this 
 little seminary more than a dozen boys, ranging 
 in ages from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, 
 and our intellectual calibre varied fully as much 
 as our years. For some of us were sent there 
 for reasons of health, and others because they 
 had not made that progress with their studies 
 which their fond parents had hoped. We had 
 no home lessons, but learned, in the two or three 
 hours of afternoon school, what we were expected 
 to remember next day." Ill-health, not genuine 
 backwardness, sent Stevenson there, and he was 
 no longer burdened with heavy tasks to study 
 
SCHOOLDAYS 157 
 
 in the evening. His father disapproved of school 
 books and school tasks. Mr. Thomson's plan, 
 free of the drudgery of home preparation, met 
 with his approval, also with Louis's. His friend 
 Baildon and he found that they had ample time 
 to worship at the shrine of literature. Louis had 
 a den in the top of the house in Heriot Row, and 
 the two boys there hatched plots for work. Deacon 
 Brodie's history had early caught Louis's fancy, 
 and in 1864 he showed his friend a drama he 
 had written on it. Louis did not desert old 
 friends or the fancies of his youth even on paper. 
 Deacon Brodie was not forgotten, and was re- 
 written later wit-h Mr. Henley's collaboration. He 
 may not have acquired much examination-passing 
 knowledge at Mr. Thomson's, but there is no 
 doubt he learned at that period a vast deal 
 out of school hours. He made few friends at 
 any of his schools. His delicacy and his dislike of 
 boisterous boyish games cut him off from them. 
 He was a solitary lad, but to his love of seclusion 
 we doubtless owe a deal, for then was the seed- 
 time to the harvest of ideas of which we reap 
 the benefit. He had travelled much in his school 
 
iS8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 days, and he travelled with observant eyes. 
 Though he was lonely, he was no recluse. Early 
 he enticed enjoyment out of what he called the 
 " task of happiness." When among surroundings 
 that pleased his sunny, responsive nature, he was 
 a life-loving, gay-hearted lad. 
 
Spring Equinox 
 
" Do you remember — can we e'er forget ? 
 How, in the coiled perplexities of youth, 
 In our wild climate, in our scowling town, 
 We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and 
 feared ?" 
 
 — " To my Old Familiars." Songs of Travel. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 Spring Equinox 
 
 "AT sixteen we should be men," said Louis 
 ■**■ to his schoolmate, Mr. Baildon, when 
 they were rambling together one Saturday, talking 
 of their futures. His comrade, looking back 
 across the waste of years and recollecting this 
 boyish statement, adds, " He, of all mortals, who 
 was in a sense always a boy ! " Every one of 
 the readers of his " verses " or his stories must 
 feel that he has awakened anew in them, even 
 from long-buried slumber, the charm of their 
 childhood. Mr. Barrie says, " He was the spirit 
 of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world 
 of ours and compelling it to come back and 
 play." But as a lad in his teens he was more 
 serious of face, more troubled of spirit than when 
 
 years had winged their flight. In his school- 
 .61 Ir 
 
i6 2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 boy photographs this tristful puzzled look clouds 
 his expression. Nevertheless, as he himself said, 
 writing of his own experience, "It is good to 
 have been young in youth, and as the years go 
 on to grow older. Many are already old before 
 they are through their teens; but to travel deli- 
 berately through one's ages is to get the heart 
 out of a liberal education." The "gloom of 
 youth," when "in the palace porch of life," he 
 " huddled with chimeras from within," was stamped 
 on his face. But all his sulky looks melted away 
 when he grew out of his teens. Merry of soul 
 he was, and merry of soul he remained to the 
 end. When he wrote Treasure Island he was 
 a man of thirty-three — he wrote it with a boyish 
 zest straight from his heart. He found, he said, 
 when reading chapter by chapter at Braemar to 
 his family that his step-son was not his only 
 boy listener. " It seemed to me," he writes, with 
 that sane critical judgment of his, "as original 
 as sin. I counted on one boy. I found I had 
 two in my audience. My father caught fire at 
 once with all the romance and childishness of 
 his original nature. His own stories that every 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 163 
 
 night of his life he put himself to sleep with 
 dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, 
 old sailors, and commercial travellers before the 
 era of steam. He never finished one of these 
 romances. He, lucky man, did not require to 
 finish them. But in Treasure Island he recognised 
 something kindred to his own imagination, it was 
 his kind of picturesque, and he not only heard 
 with delight the daily chapter but set himself 
 actively to collaborate. When the time came for 
 Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must 
 have passed the better part of a day preparing 
 on the back of a legal envelope an inventory of 
 its contents, which I exactly followed, and the 
 name of Flint's old ship, the Walrus, was given 
 at his particular request." Louis unconsciously 
 here pays his own powers a pretty compliment, 
 letting us see how his intimate knowledge of what 
 would please and interest a boy resurrected in his 
 grave father the boyishness of old. And Mr. 
 Stevenson was not alone in thus returning to 
 this second childhood. In the preface to the 
 translation of Treasure Island into French, it is 
 stated that Mr. Gladstone once returned home 
 
1 64 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 from the House of Commons and, by chance, 
 picked up the book. He soon became entangled 
 in the seductive mesh of its plot, read on to the 
 end, and found he had lost his night's sleep in 
 the pursuit of Treasure. Mrs. Barrie, we know, 
 refused to go to rest till she saw how the hero 
 laddie got safe out of the apple barrel. 
 
 Louis thoroughly enjoyed the planning and 
 weaving of these tales of adventure. When young 
 he was withheld by sickness from active participa- 
 tion in stirring deeds ; but when he was free to do 
 as he listed, with as much ardour in his thirties 
 as if he were still in his teens, he sailed among 
 tropic Ultima Thules and tasted of the life 
 after which . he had yearned for formerly. But 
 when he was finishing his schooldays in Edin- 
 burgh, and wearying to imprint an exploring 
 foot on the trackless desert of his future, he was, 
 unhappily, depressed by the seriousness of the 
 art of living, which he vowed was the most difficult 
 of all the arts — an art for the teaching of which 
 no provision is made. 
 
 He had been pleased with the conversation of 
 his dramatis personce in the shape of tin soldiers 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 165 
 
 and those coloured paper figures which slid on 
 to his mimic stage in tin grooves called spoons. 
 He made a toy theatre with a stage two feet deep 
 and nine inches high, and the soldiers were played 
 with round the nursery table or kept him com- 
 pany in bed. Their actions, when he wrote 
 them down, did not seem so full of vigour and 
 reality as they had been when first he conjured 
 them up in his mind. He realized then that 
 he could never rest until he could transfer his 
 thoughts into fitting words, and he was a hard 
 task-master to himself. He knew the bent of 
 his inclinations, but before him loomed the here- 
 ditary seat in his father's office. He was proud 
 of the work which his father and the others of 
 that strenuous family had accomplished, but 
 he felt that he was forced to flee the labours of 
 his sires. 
 
 " I must arise, O father, and to port 
 Some lost, complaining- seaman pilot home," 
 
 he sang; but it was not by the Stevenson 
 works or by their beacons, piercing the dark- 
 ness, that he accomplished this vow. By the 
 flashes of his pen he lightened the way on the 
 
166 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 sea of life to many. He knew he had no aptitude 
 for the engineer's trade. He knew this as a 
 boy when by the sea he saw his father, ever 
 thinking of his profession, " pass hours on the 
 beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, 
 noting their least deflection, noting when they 
 broke. On Tweedside or by Lyne or Manor, we 
 have spent together whole afternoons ; to me at 
 the time extremely wearisome ; to him, as I am 
 now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying. The 
 river was to me a pretty and various spectacle ; 
 I could not see — I could not be made to see — it 
 otherwise. To my father it was a chequer board 
 of lively forces, which he traced from pool to 
 shallow with minute appreciation and enduring 
 interest. It was to me like school in holidays ; 
 but to him, until I had worn him out with my 
 invincible triviality, a delight." This "engineer's 
 voluminous handy book of nature" was one 
 which Louis could never read. His Eastern- 
 looking eyes saw differently from his father's 
 Norse grey ones. Ever before him Tusitala saw 
 the office stool. The life such as his grandfather 
 had led in the olden days when the lighthouse 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 167 
 
 towers were being founded and their lamps first 
 lit was attractive enough, full of adventure, sailing, 
 riding, wreckers, and storms. But Louis knew that 
 his unconquerable gipsy fancy must have its way. 
 " It is an evil age," he deplores, " for the gipsily 
 inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on 
 a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth 
 and glory." He gave up all thoughts of the 
 former to avoid the ledgers and the office ; but he, 
 like his kinsmen, was of the " ready and the strong 
 of word," and he determined to. cultivate this 
 talent of language which lay dormant within him. 
 He had in him, too, the doggedness which made 
 these kinsmen such victorious fighters against the 
 encroaching seas. Mr. Baildon, who read as soon 
 as they were written Louis's schoolboy literary 
 efforts, says,_ "There is no sign in these early 
 attempts of anything premature or precocious, 
 and nothing can. be truer, in spite of his early 
 bent towards letters, than that his success was the 
 fruit, as he himself alleges, of persistent industry 
 and indefatigable perseverance." Louis Stevenson 
 determined to master what he called the " kittle 
 art " of writing, and as a schooboy knew that he 
 
1 68 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 had before him a sore task to mount his Hill of 
 Difficulty. 
 
 He had to begin his ascent in the face of 
 paternal discountenance. Till well up in his 
 teens his gipsy inclinations had been in abeyance. 
 He was amenable to discipline and amenable to 
 orthodox Edinburgh life. As a small boy he had 
 enjoyed being dressed by his two mothers, and 
 was a show child at juvenile parties, franker 
 than his comrades, with courteous manners, 
 an utter absence of Scottish gaucherie, and a 
 strong wish to dance and talk, and be pleased 
 and pleasant. Even as a schoolboy, unlike others 
 of his years and nation, he went to parties with 
 a good grace and good manners. There was no 
 trouble then about getting him into evening dress. 
 Other boys had to be threatened into velveteens 
 and kilts, and sulked in corners on their arrival 
 at the festive scene. A host of Louis's in the 
 Academy days remembered him as the nice boy 
 who came in to dance with his youngsters of an 
 evening, executing his steps with all the airs and 
 graces of a dancing master, and talking to his 
 elders like a sage. " The little Frenchman " his 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 169 
 
 hostess called him, so polite was he, so gay. He 
 liked fine clothes in these days, and was particular 
 as to his appearance, envious a little of the boys 
 who donned the garb of old Gaul, for he ever had 
 an eye for bright colour and regretted he was 
 too ill put together to wear a tartan kilt. He 
 travelled much in his boyhood, when he was 
 forced to follow the swallows in search of the 
 sun, and says his senses were alternately stunned 
 and quickened by the novelties he saw. He had 
 read and observed more than most boys of his 
 years, and he was free from all insular prejudices. 
 About the time that he went to Mr. Thomson 
 he began to feel that he was shut up within 
 the Bastille of civilization, and the sense of im- 
 prisonment galled him. The feel of the fetters 
 changed him into a sedate boy who did not care 
 to join other lads and lassies who played in the 
 gardens in front of Heriot Row. When the 
 thrushes and blackbirds began to sing in the 
 shrubberies, when back-street children, as sure as 
 the days lengthened, span tops, and played hop- 
 scotch on the pavement, these gardens began to 
 fill with young folk from Heriot Row. The boys 
 
170 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 climbed trees and held high revels aloft, played 
 cricket on forbidden stretches of sward, defied 
 the gardener, and encouraged the girls to follow 
 them over the borders. 
 
 Louis never joined these neighbouring children 
 at their unruly sports. He noted when the flower- 
 ing currant and tender greening began to appear 
 among the dull-leaved, winter-enduring shrubs, 
 and listened amid the grey solemn town for " the 
 premonitory notes of the bestirring birds," sounds 
 pleasant to his ear in the silence before dawn. 
 He disliked the other bipeds of his own species 
 who played in these well-wooded, green-turfed 
 gardens. He disliked their noisy games. He 
 felt that " shades of the prison house " were closing 
 more and more oppressively in on him, and he 
 had no elbow-room. He was too much in leading- 
 strings yet to see hope of escape. He went off to 
 corners of the Princes Street gardens and rumin- 
 ated under the shadow of the Castle rock, where 
 no boys came and asked him to join in their 
 brawling play, or, worse still, jeered at him for 
 refusing, knowing he was physically unable to cow 
 them into order or accept the/r challenge to fight 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 171 
 
 Far away from these disturbing elements he 
 could talk in comfort with a rare friend, or 
 ponder according to his fancy, while looking 
 over the transformed valley. He, the " consistent 
 idler," had begun his literary task. "Sooner or 
 later," he said at Vailima, " somehow, anyhow, I 
 was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to 
 ask why. Men are born with various manias ; 
 from my earliest childhood it was mine to make 
 a plaything of imaginary series of events, and as 
 soon as I was able to write I became a good 
 friend of the paper-makers. Reams upon reams 
 must have gone to the making of Rathillet, The 
 Pentland Rising, 1 The King's Pardon, otherwise 
 Park Whitehead, Edward Daven, A Country 
 Dance, and A Vendetta in the West, and it is 
 consolatory these reams are now all ashes and 
 have been received again into the soil." This 
 cremated Rathillet was written when he was 
 
 1 " Ne pas confondre. Not the slim green pamphlet with 
 the imprint of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with 
 amazement from the book lists) the gentlemen of England 
 are willing to pay fancy prices, but its predecessor, a bulky 
 historical romance without a spark of merit, and now 
 deleted from the world." 
 
172 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 fifteen. Though he was then and ever after so 
 severe and fair a critic of his own works, his two 
 mothers were vastly proud of these boyish at- 
 tempts. His father never heeded Louis's edu- 
 cation. He was well pleased that his son was 
 not brilliant in his classes, for he knew he was 
 busy in his own way. A book was his chosen 
 companion. Mr. Stevenson let him wander at 
 will through his own selected library, where 
 Louis says, " the proceedings of learned societies, 
 some Latin divinity, encyclopaedias, physical 
 science, and above all, optics, held the chief place 
 upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and 
 corners that anything really legible existed as by 
 accident." 
 
 Twice Mrs. Stevenson had two short pieces of 
 her son's printed for private circulation. She 
 lived to see these little booklets fetch more than 
 their weight in gold. A manuscript for which he 
 received £$ 3J. was lately unearthed and sold 
 for £26. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson pooh-poohed the adulation ac- 
 corded to the boyish author by his mother and 
 nurse, so when praise came from his firm-set lips, 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 173 
 
 it was all the sweeter. The Pentland Rising was 
 one of these immature booklets, not in reams, 
 but in the reduced form, which Louis mentions 
 in a note already quoted. The Charity Bazaar 
 was another. This was written for a sale of 
 work held in Mrs. Stevenson's drawing-room 
 for the benefit of some foreign mission she was 
 interested in. The booklet was sold in 1896 for 
 £25. A second-hand bookseller told me of this 
 fancy price, adding, " I don't believe his mother 
 had £2$ worth of work on her drawing-room 
 table." I repeated this to Mrs. Stevenson, who 
 was astonished at the figure her book, as she 
 called it, fetched nowadays ; but casting her mind 
 back thirty years, she added, " Indeed his mother 
 had more than £2$ worth of work at her Charity 
 Bazaar, for I remember I made £7$, not counting 
 Lew's book, which sold for 6d. a copy." 
 
 In 1867 Louis's easy-going schooldays ended. 
 That year was a memorable one in the annals of 
 the Stevenson family, for it was at that time that 
 they bought Swanston Cottage, that favoured 
 spot, " a green fold in the lap of the Pentlands." 
 Mrs. Stevenson and Louis found seeking health in 
 
i 7 4 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the South irksome. Mr. Stevenson felt depressed 
 when left alone in the grim North. Summers had 
 been passed at the seaside, at Tweedside, and 
 various haunts within range of Edinburgh, so that 
 the engineer might spend week-ends with wife 
 and son ; but such an arrangement did not satisfy 
 Mr. Stevenson. He wanted a home within easy 
 reach of that office which his son so dreaded. 
 Mrs. Stevenson knew the restful quiet, the pure 
 air, of the green ridge of hills which guards 
 Edinburgh on the south, and which looked down 
 into the chimneys of the old manse at Colinton. 
 She had always thriven under their sheltering 
 shadow, so Swanston was seen, liked, and bought. 
 All who have read St. Ives know Swanston. as 
 it was when the Stevensons first made it their 
 spring and summer home — a place to go to for 
 rest and change even in midwinter. 
 
 Once upon a time the Edinburgh magistrates 
 had built a cottage at Swanston, a cottage to 
 which they might retire when worn out with the 
 affairs of the city. In Picturesque Notes Louis 
 ' tells the history of Swanston when under the rule 
 of the civic dignitaries. " The dell was turned 
 
SPRING EQUINOX i 7S 
 
 into a garden ; and on the knoll that shelters it 
 from the plain and the sea winds, they built 
 a cottage looking to the hills. They brought 
 crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which 
 they were then restoring, and disposed them on 
 the gables and over the door and about the 
 garden." They planted their pleasure grounds 
 with trees, they swathed the house, decorated 
 with church quarried stones, in clematis, and the 
 Stevensons reaped the harvest of the long- dead 
 bailies' planting and building. They lived there 
 constantly from March to October, and in course 
 of time the old house St. Ives knew had to be 
 enlarged to suit more modern notions of comfort. 
 With its sunny frontage, its immunity from the 
 sweep of the scathing east winds, its nearness in 
 point of distance to the town, its retiredness from 
 all town bustle, though within sight of the city's 
 towers and steeples which lie like an anchored 
 fleet at the base of Arthur's Seat — the place suited 
 the Stevenson family admirably. None loved it 
 more than their wandering child, who by his 
 magical memory was enabled to retrace his " nu- 
 merous footsteps" when he willed, to see again, 
 
176 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 from across the wide world, his Pentland home 
 nestling like the ewe buchts among the broom 
 of the Cowden-knowes " in the lirk of the hill." 
 
 Swanston is some three miles from Edinburgh ; 
 but the houses, "the new folds of city" that 
 Louis saw "glitter," increase yearly. They have 
 all but invaded Shirley's Hermitage, and march- 
 ing over its secluded valley, are rapidly advancing 
 to Fairmilehead. Still even to-day Swanston so 
 determinedly turns its back on Edinburgh, and 
 looks up to the scarred brow of Caerketton, that 
 it refuses to see the advancing tide of the city. 
 The one o'clock gun from the Castle keeps the 
 Swanston clocks correctly timed. The nightly 
 bugle blown from that Castle too reaches it when 
 evenings are still, or the winds blowing in that 
 direction. Otherwise Swanston hears nothing of 
 the neighbouring town — hears only the sheep 
 bleating and the peewits crying, as with a swish 
 of wings they pass nigh the house. Sometimes 
 the plaintive wail of the gulls, driven inland by 
 
 stress of weather, or forced, like many 
 Scot, to follow at the plough's tail to 
 break in on the hillside quiet with 
 
 an honoured 
 earn a meal, 
 their husky 
 
SPRING EQUINOX i 77 
 
 sea voices. The old house of Swanston, once 
 the grange of Whitekirk Abbey, is close to the 
 cottage, a bleak building exposed to the winds, 
 for its founders sought no "lirk." Its nearness 
 does not disturb its more recent neighbour. The 
 voices from the clachan of cottages gathered round 
 the older house, the bustle of life from the farm- 
 yard, toned by distance, sound pleasantly on the 
 ears of those in the garden that Robert Young 
 tended. 
 
 Louis's books are all full of autobiographical 
 glimpses. We can trace whence he drew foun- 
 dations for a plot, backgrounds for a story. 
 Wandering on the uplands, hearkening to the 
 weird cry of the whaups, or to the wind " austere 
 and pure " whistling in his ears as it whistles in 
 the shrouds of a ship at sea, the Pentlands were 
 to him the historic ground where the Covenanters 
 made their stand. His first history of them (the 
 one that consumed so many reams of paper) was 
 suggested to his mind by the monument to those 
 who stood by their creed, which lies between 
 Colinton and Swanston, and to which, when he 
 was at the Old Manse, he walked. When Swans? 
 
 12 
 
178 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 ton was his home his legs were longer, and 
 he went further afield, and so perhaps saw the 
 grave in the hills, " Sacred to the Memory of a 
 Covenanter, who fought and was wounded at 
 Rullion Green, November 28th, 1666, and who 
 died at Oaken Bush the day after the battle, 
 and was buried here by Adam Sanderson, of 
 Blackhill." This martyr was a westland man, 
 and he made his companion promise to bury him 
 on the ridge where through a gap in the range 
 there is a peep away to his well-loved Ayrshire. 
 The lonely hills for the lonely Louis were peopled 
 with the makers of history. 
 
 At Swanston he had studies for his pen before 
 his window. Robert, the gardener, " was lowly, 
 and a peacemaker, and a servant of God." Then 
 the shepherd, whose bellowing commands ordering 
 Louis to "c'way out amang the sheep," at first 
 hounded the youth from his snug nooks on the 
 braeside, till, as he says, " I skulked in my favourite 
 wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing Time, 
 and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his 
 dogs my questing dragoons." But the trespassing 
 young ruralist stuck to his haunts, and 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 179 
 
 "Wi' sober heart, 
 For meditation sat apairt, 
 When orra loves or kittle art 
 Perplexed my mind." 
 
 He learned in time not to fear John Todd, and 
 before long the queerly assorted pair became close 
 friends. " The oldest herd on the Pentland " 
 was full of tales of his " curlew-scattering, sheep- 
 collecting life." The student sat "weel neukit 
 atween the muckle Pentland knees,'' with his 
 books, though he confesses he read little, and 
 listened eagerly to his whilom enemy, John Todd. 
 " He was," Louis explains, " a wayfarer, and took 
 my gipsy fancy." Louis owns that John and 
 Robert were never particularly friendly one to 
 another — Robert was too conventional, too even 
 grooved — but he would not dissociate his two 
 Swanston friends. In 1894 he writes from Vailima 
 about the Edinburgh edition : " I think the old 
 gardener has to stay where I put him last. It 
 would not do to separate John and Robert." 
 These days of idle lounging on the Pentlands, 
 though Horace or Montaigne lay unopened beside 
 him, were days in which, according to Thoreau's 
 
180 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 reasoning, Louis grew. But these growing days 
 were in the summer-tide, when he learned much 
 listening to the shepherd's tale under the haw- 
 thorn. There were winter days in town, and, his 
 schooling over, he was entered at Edinburgh 
 University. He describes himself at this period 
 as " a certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, 
 full of changing humours, fine occasional purposes 
 of good, unflinching acceptance of evil, shiverings 
 on wet east-windy mornings, journeys up to class, 
 infinite yawnings during lectures, and unquestion- 
 able gusto in the delights of truantry." 
 
 Mr. Baildon comments on this description. 
 " Stevenson called himself ' ugly ' in his student 
 days, but I think this is a term that never at any 
 time fitted him. In body he was assuredly badly 
 set up. His limbs were long, lean, and spidery, 
 and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest mal- 
 nutriment, such sharp corners did his joints make 
 under his clothes." Another contemporary student, 
 writing in a daily paper at the time of Stevenson's 
 death, recalls him as "a thin, pale-faced youth, 
 with piercing eyes, ever in a hurry, cigarette in 
 mouth and muffler round his neck, and with loose 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 181 
 
 locks which suggested an advisable early in- 
 terview with a skilful barber." At this period 
 he was perturbed, discontented, rebellious, and as 
 his expression was moulded by his feelings he was 
 not so far wrong in his verdict of " ugly." These 
 were the days when he leaned on the parapet 
 of the North Bridge and enviously watched the 
 trains gliding off " on a voyage to brighter skies. 
 Happy the passengers who shake off the dust of 
 Edinburgh, and have heard for the last time the 
 cry of the east wind among her chimney tops. 
 And yet the place," he adds, " establishes an in- 
 terest in people's hearts ; go where they will, they 
 find no city of the same distinction ; go where they 
 will, they take a pride in their old home." Re- 
 membering how he felt, chained and trammelled 
 in the city of his birth, he sympathised in An 
 Inland Voyage with the omnibus driver at Mau- 
 berge, who "had a spark of something human 
 in his soul, whose bones thirsted all the while 
 for travel." Louis had, like many, "aspired 
 angrily after that somewhere else of the imagina- 
 tion where all troubles are supposed to end." It 
 was at this period, too, that he could sympathise 
 
i8z R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 with Ferguson, the poet, whom he calls " the poor 
 white-faced, drunken, vicious boy . . . my un- 
 happy predecessor on the causey of Auld Reekie. 
 I believe Ferguson lives in me, I do. But ' tell 
 it not in Gath.' Every man has these fanciful 
 superstitions coming, going, but yet enduring ; 
 only most men are so wise (or the poet in them 
 so dead) that they keep their follies for them- 
 selves." 
 
 Stevenson, loitering at college, with the visions 
 of the harness of an engineer awaiting him, and 
 longing all the while for the collar work of litera- 
 ture, was in the full blast of the equinoctial gales 
 of youth. This spring hurricane was hard to 
 weather, but he steered his course out from among 
 the breakers in an obstinate, headstrong way, and 
 became, in the words of his friend Mr. Henley — 
 
 " The master of his fate, 
 The captain of his soul." 
 
 "On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to 
 get these words inscribed : ' He clung to his 
 paddle,' " Louis said in his first book, An Inland 
 Voyage. In this watery journey, the Arethusa had 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 183 
 
 borne him gallantly down the Oise, till it rushed 
 below a fallen tree, and then, the canoe absconding, 
 like Absalom's steed, left her skipper entangled 
 in the branches. " Death himself had me by the 
 heels," he wrote, " for this was his last ambuscade, 
 and he must now personally join in the fray. And 
 still I clung to my paddle? The paddle with 
 which he plied his course in life, with which he 
 steered into our hearts, was in reality his pen. He 
 clung to it despite adverse currents, and wielded 
 it moreover with a boyish gaiety of spirit which 
 showed his heroic pluck. "Gladly I lived," he 
 truly sang. 
 
 When he left school, however, he was not 
 allowed to use the paddle he eventually handled 
 so well. While yet in his teens the pattern idler 
 was sent to view the practical part of engineering. 
 He certainly made an effort to give his father's 
 profession a trial. He went to Anstruther, where 
 the Stevenson firm were building a breakwater. 
 It was hoped that he would glean engineering 
 experience in this Fife village. " What I gleaned 
 I am sure I don't know," he exclaims ; " I had 
 already my own private determination to be an 
 
1 84 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 author ; I loved the art of words and the appear- 
 ances of life, and travellers, and headers, and rubble, 
 and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even 
 the thrilling question of the string course interested 
 me only (if they interested me at all) as properties 
 for some possible romance, or as words to add 
 to my vocabulary." He was most industrious 
 when off duty. Then it was that he wrote the 
 cremated Covenanting novel, Voces Fidelium, and 
 dialogues of a dramatic character in verse, also 
 committed to the flames. There was no blunting 
 the eager edge of Louis's curiosity, and among 
 his engineering experiences none pleased him 
 more than descending in diver's dress to the foun- 
 dation of the harbour that was being formed. He 
 enjoyed that submarine visit, and in Random 
 Memories he has given us a glimpse of what he 
 viewed out of the distorted-eyed helmet. During 
 this walk with the guide he had bribed to accom- 
 pany him, he swayed like a weed, and had dizzy, 
 muddleheaded joy in his surroundings, grabbing 
 at the fish which darted past him. "This ex- 
 perience was," he says, " one of the best things 
 I got from my education as an engineer." The 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 185 
 
 outdoor side of engineering life found favour in 
 his sight, but he complains that he or others 
 " with a memory full of ships and seas and perilous 
 headlands and the shining pharos, must apply his 
 long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, 
 or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages 
 of consecutive figures." The most comfortable 
 gold-lined office would not tempt this freedom- 
 loving youth within its doors. 
 
 His meagre attention to his engineering studies 
 came to his father's ears. Mr. Stevenson was 
 annoyed, too, at his son's rapidly developed Bo- 
 hemianism. Louis, suffering from an inquisitive- 
 ness which often led him into mischief, had a 
 fancy for all sorts of strange amusements and 
 associates. He rebelled against all orthodox en- 
 tertainments, and could seldom be cajoled into 
 dress clothes, or persuaded to mix with his equals 
 in age and social standing. He would not even 
 dress himself in a seemly style. Nothing but 
 the oddest, shabbiest garments, peculiar in cut 
 and colour, would he figure in. His father con- 
 formed to rules and conventionalities in a peace- 
 able, law-abiding manner. His aim was to avoid 
 
1 86 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 attracting observation, as he was wishful to go 
 about his business as unostentatiously as possible. 
 Louis's tastes were in striking antipathy to those 
 of his quiet father, for Louis was vain, although 
 he was not conceited. He weighed and judged 
 his intellectual powers and faults with a searching 
 saneness, and his gifts, his achievements, his 
 honours, never made him vain. It was a forgiv- 
 able vanity his. It grew out of a wish to be 
 appreciated and pleasant. One sees its like in 
 children. They will seize a tea cosy and put it 
 on their heads, or don a pair of spectacles and 
 march into a room, brimful of expectancy at the 
 laugh they hope will greet them. Louis's vanity 
 was such that one can only smile at it, it is so 
 innocently apparent. Louis loved to give and 
 receive surprises. His stepdaughter tells how he 
 would pin in noticeable places, verses he had 
 written as birthday or home-coming greetings. 
 That was when his quaint whims were treasured 
 as coming from a man of genius. In his Edin- 
 burgh days he made no verses, but in their place 
 his puerile affectation of oddness was his ruse to 
 attract attention. He and Professor Blackie were 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 187 
 
 somewhat akin in their childish stratagems to 
 feed their child-like vanity. They both became 
 enamoured of their eccentricities, which sprang 
 in both cases from the same peculiar state of 
 mind. The Greek professor's well-known plaid in 
 which he paraded Princes Street, the straw hat 
 and dressing-gown he wore in his home, were 
 very becoming costumes, much more pleasing than 
 those of his truant student with his incongruously 
 assorted habiliments. These two Scotsmen had 
 a gay Gallic vein in them which made them 
 overleap national shyness, and this ingenuous 
 vanity and the irresponsible playfulness in their 
 sunshiny natures made them play a rdle all their 
 own. 
 
 Louis, in a letter telegraphic in its brevity, gives 
 a summary of this period of his life : " I was 
 educated for a civil engineer on my father's de- 
 sign, and was at the building of harbours and 
 lighthouses, and worked in a carpenter's shop and 
 a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and 
 the like. Then it came out I was learning nothing, 
 and, on being tightly cross-questioned during a 
 dreadful evening walk, I owned I cared for nothing 
 
1 88 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 but literature. My father said that was no pro- 
 fession, but I might be called to the Bar if I 
 chose. At the age of twenty-one I began to study 
 lawi" That was doubtless a very dreadful evening 
 walk, but people are apt too often to consider 
 Thomas Stevenson a dense, short-sighted man for 
 thus trying to thwart his boy's wishes. A great 
 deal has to be said on Mr. Stevenson senior's 
 side. His wisdom in insisting on Louis .be- 
 coming an advocate bore good fruit. It gave the 
 plunging, restive youth, who was then an im- 
 petuous, unbroken colt, like to gallop himself lame 
 with eagerness, a taste of the disciplining curb. 
 It gave him a line of steadying, wholesome routine 
 to follow, and meanwhile he had time to gain 
 more tolerance and insight into his own as well 
 as other people's natures. Mr. Stevenson was 
 bitterly disappointed on that dreadful evening 
 walk. He had helped to build a great and 
 honoured business ; he wished his son to con- 
 tinue in his solid, utilitarian profession. As a 
 docile child Louis craved to be an engineer. 
 When other children fixed on their future careers, 
 little Lew vowed — 
 
SPRING EQUINOX 189 
 
 "But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm 
 to do, 
 
 O Leerie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with 
 you." 
 
 He visited the harbours of Fife, when thirteen, 
 with Mr. Stevenson. " My first professional tour, 
 my first journey in the complete character of man 
 without the help of petticoats," he proudly calls 
 this visit to the golden fringe of the grey mantle 
 of the kingdom of Fife. Louis enjoyed these ex- 
 cursions with his father hugely. Mr. Stevenson's 
 heart's desire was to see his son established in what 
 had become an hereditary vocation in his family. 
 Then, suddenly, he found he had a changeling 
 child, who would wrest no vantage ground from 
 the ocean, nor toil till he built on some wild shore 
 a protective harbour or a tower flashing with an 
 abiding warning light. He was determined to 
 pursue that will-o'-the-wisp, literature. From 
 Vailima, in one of his last letters, Louis, recalling 
 that sore fight with his father, and some of Mr. 
 Stevenson's arguments in favour of his sure pro- 
 fession, says : " Were it not for my health, which 
 made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart 
 to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest 
 
i go R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 common-place trade when I was young, which 
 might have supported me during these ill years. 
 But you men with salaries don't know how a 
 family weighs on a fellow's mind." 
 
 Sage old Johnson says, " When a man is young 
 he thinks himself of great importance. As he ad- 
 vances in life he learns to think himself of no con- 
 sequence, and becomes more patient and better 
 pleased." 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson was wayward and im- 
 patient, full of " the gloom of youth," in the days 
 which culminated in that " dreadful " walk. Suave 
 of tongue, kind of heart, as a rule sensitively shrink- 
 ing from wounding any one, he flouted and ran 
 counter to his father on many subjects with the 
 inhuman selfishness of youth. The reserved elder 
 man was more pained than the fervid, agitating 
 son. But they were closely bound together for all 
 their antagonism. They had many a united talk, 
 though it seemed to those who knew not their 
 ways, a wordy war ; but, like wise men before them, 
 they, "except in opinion]' were not disagreeing, 
 having, as a modern writer says, " the same im- 
 mense orthodoxy that lies beneath our differences." 
 
SPRING EQUINOX i 9 r 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson was relieved, when her husband 
 and son returned from that memorable evening 
 confabulation, to find the storm which had been 
 pending had broken and cleared the atmosphere. 
 Mr. Stevenson held that none of Louis's juvenile 
 efforts at writing, which his mother treasured, were 
 of sufficient merit to justify his thinking of earning 
 his bread by his pen. He hoped his readiness of 
 speech might help him at the Bar. Sir Walter 
 Scott averred his legal training had given him 
 stability. He regarded literature as a crutch, not 
 as a sole staff. Louis Stevenson liked the idea of 
 following Scott, though he resolved literature would 
 be his staff. It is curious that he, like Scott, 
 learned much of seafaring among the misty isles of 
 the North. Louis journeyed in the Pharos, the 
 Northern Lighthouse steamer. Louis's grand- 
 father and Sir Walter had viewed the scenes of 
 The Pirate in a voyage in 1814 in the Pharos of 
 that day. Mrs. Stevenson approved of the settle- 
 ment of the vexed question. Many a literary man 
 besides Scott had walked the boards of the Parlia- 
 ment House and been all the better man of letters 
 for his legal training and standing. She, perhaps 
 
i 9 2 K L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 alone, knew how bitter a disappointment it was to 
 her husband to have his only son refuse to become 
 heir to the business he had arduously and proudly 
 enlarged. She, as usual, took a cheerful view of 
 the future, pictured Louis a learned judge, as the 
 mention of the pen as a staff irritated the engineer, 
 and while she allayed her husband's heartburnings 
 she encouraged the son to begin his legal studies 
 seriously, so as to earn time eventually to proceed 
 with his chosen profession, which his father per- 
 sisted was no profession at all. 
 
 Like Fleeming Jenkin, he held (till in each case 
 Louis proved to them they were wrong) "that 
 literature was not a trade ; that it was no craft ; 
 that the professed author was merely an amateur 
 with a door-plate." 
 
 Louis recognised the fact that he had wounded 
 his father on his tenderest point, that he had taken 
 these wounds gallantly, and had advised wisely ; 
 so to make amends he promised to do more than 
 look into his law classes when he happened to pass 
 that way. 
 
 Before he was twenty-one Louis had weathered 
 the heaviest equinoctial gale of his spring-time of 
 
SPRING EQUINOX I93 
 
 life ; and he now looked forward hopefully to the 
 desert of the future, though his mother was the 
 only one who believed, at that time, that he would 
 turn that desert into an evergreen garden. 
 
 *3 
 
Learning to Write 
 
"The morning drum-call on my eager ear 
 Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew 
 Lies yet undried along my field of noon." 
 
 — Songs of Travel. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 Learning to Write 
 
 " "^T^ one ever ^ ac ^ su °k P a ' ns to * earn a trac ^ e 
 ■*■ ' as I had, but I slogged at it day in day 
 
 out, and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire in- 
 dustry) I have done more with smaller gifts than 
 almost any man of letters in the world," he wrote 
 in 1887. He began his apprenticeship to the art 
 he adopted almost in babyhood, trying to put his 
 thoughts into words when he had not very long 
 gained the power of speech, and insisting on 
 Cummy writing his gibberish. The History of 
 Moses was his first comprehensible piece of com- 
 position ; then that was followed by Records of 
 Noseingdale and the Sunbeam, and by 1864 he 
 had manuscripts in his Heriot Row den to consult 
 over and show to his literary school friend. In 
 these hobbledehoy days he wrote many ponderous 
 
198 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 works. In his thirteenth year, while on a tour 
 to Fife with his father, he was full of excitement 
 at the prospect of a drive over Magus Moor and of 
 passing the spot where Archbishop Sharpe was 
 murdered. Among the partakers in that deed 
 Louis confesses : " The figure that always fixed my 
 attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting 
 in the saddle with his cloak about his mouth. An 
 incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which 
 awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the 
 eye. How little do we realize its perdurable power ! 
 Had he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or 
 had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, 
 he would not have haunted the imagination of my 
 boyhood. It is an old temptation with me to 
 pluck away that cloak and see the face ; to open 
 that bosom and read the heart. With incomplete 
 romances about Hackston the drawers of my youth 
 were lumbered." In these years of preparation for 
 a legal career his mind was set on literature. He 
 determined to succeed in putting into fitting 
 phrases the thoughts that welled up so freely. 
 Great was his admiration of those who had suc- 
 ceeded. He says he played the " sedulous ape " to 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 199 
 
 Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, 
 Defoe, Hawthorne, and Montaigne. He called 
 these trials at imitations "monkey tricks" and 
 " ventriloquial efforts." " It was so Keats learned," 
 he says, " and there never was a finer temperament 
 in literature." Edinburgh being, as he notes, a 
 town with the traffic congested into a few streets, 
 residents ofttimes encounter their fellow-townsmen. • 
 In Princes Street, Louis constantly observed Dr. 
 John Brown strolling along, spectacled, benign, 
 keenly but kindly eyeing the passers-by. The 
 Doctor, in Louis's eyes, was never alone, for 
 behind him stalked his immortal dog "Rab." 
 Louis heartily envied the man who had created 
 that faithful follower, for he had never studied 
 the trade of writing ; but as Louis, speaking to 
 him in his verses, notes : — 
 
 "Your e'e was gleg, your fingers dink; 
 Ye didna fash yoursel' to think, 
 But wove, as fast as puss can link, 
 
 Your denty wab ; 
 Ye stapped your pen into the ink, 
 An' there was Rab!" 
 
 But Louis knew well that, as a rule, it took years 
 of strife to make an author's 
 
200 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 "Things o' clay spreid wings o' life." 
 Another example of one who seemed to enjoy 
 a heaven-born intuition how to wield a pleasing 
 pen, had also limped cheerfully along Princes 
 Street. Of Scott, Louis says, " Of the pleasures of 
 his art he tasted fully ; but of its toils and vigils 
 and distresses never man knew less. A great 
 romantic — an idle child." 
 
 Freakish and fitful as Louis was, he realized 
 from the first it was not chance that would help 
 him into the foremost ranks. Some he knew 
 would spend years seeking for the four-leaved 
 clover, the coveted key to the gates of fortune, 
 while others would plough and sow till they had 
 a field of four-leaved clovers. These workers 
 trusted not to luck, but to labour ; for, as Mark 
 Twain says, in one of his serious moments, 
 " There is many a way to win in this world, but 
 none of them is much worth without good hard 
 work to back it." 
 
 In a " College Magazine," Louis describes how 
 he, the seemingly consistent pattern idler in his 
 dronish wanderings, was in reality always busy, 
 for he was armed with two books — one to read 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 201 
 
 and one to write in. " It was not so much," he 
 says, "that I wished to be an author (though I 
 wished that too), as that I vowed that I would learn 
 to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me, 
 and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to 
 whistle, in a wager with myself." He persevered 
 till he said, " he had legions of words swarming 
 to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simul- 
 taneously bidding for his choice, and he himself 
 knowing what he wants to do and (within the 
 narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it." 
 
 In 1873 he made the acquaintance of Sidney 
 Colvin, who became his adviser and critic in 
 literature, and who introduced him to some in- 
 fluential editors. Louis's first paper was pub- 
 lished in The Portfolio. The essay was entitled 
 "Roads," and was signed L. S. Stoneven. His 
 second, "Ordered South," written the same 
 winter at Mentone, appeared in Macmillan's 
 Magazine. This article, founded on fact, for his 
 health sent him abroad, took him three months 
 to write, for he was still an apprentice, and even 
 when a master craftsman he would write and 
 re-write with laborious patience. " Whole chapters 
 
202 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 of Otto" he tells us, "were written as often as 
 five or six times." Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin was 
 living at Bournemouth when Louis was writing 
 her husband's memoir. " I used," she says, " to 
 go to his room in the afternoon after tea, and 
 tell him all I could remember of certain times 
 and circumstances. He would listen intently, 
 every now and then checking me while he made 
 a short note, or asking me to repeat or amplify 
 what I had said, if it had not been quite clear. 
 Next morning I went to him again, and he read 
 aloud to me what he had written — my two hours 
 of talk compressed into a page, and yet it seemed 
 to me all there, all expressed. He would make 
 me note what he had written, word by word, 
 asking me, 'Does this express quite exactly 
 what you mean?' Sometimes he offered me 
 alternative words, ' Does this express it more 
 truly ? ' If I objected to any sentence as not 
 conveying my meaning, he would alter it again 
 and again, unwearied in taking pains." Will 
 o' the Mill was the first story he ventured to 
 reprint. The scenery in it was in part a remem- 
 brance of the Brenner Pass, in the Tyrol, which 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 203 
 
 he had crossed when twelve. As a boy, he 
 must have studied his surroundings, and with 
 his artistic perceptions all awake, decided it 
 would make a telling scenic effect when he 
 would stage a romance to suit it. His father 
 complained that Louis did not use the eyes God 
 had given him, but was gazing at trivialities, 
 while the engineer was observing the forceful 
 action of the Tweed, and considering how best 
 it could be yoked to work for human good. 
 While Thomas Stevenson's sight had been trained 
 to "pore over the engineer's voluminous handy 
 book of nature," his son's brown eyes were 
 noting vital trifles from a different line of vision 
 and his observations were vivid and lasting. 
 Like the true artist he was, he was ever busy 
 taking sketches from nature, which he stowed 
 away in his memory, and had the happy knack 
 of finding again when he wished to work them 
 into his bigger canvas. John Todd's tales of 
 how he took his flocks across the border, by 
 these inviting by-ways, the now deserted old 
 drove loans, of the perils of the journey, Louis 
 listened to in the Pentlands, and these reminis- 
 
2o 4 R- L- STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 cences enabled him to put the audacious Anne 
 St. Ives under a reliable escort when he left the 
 shelter of Swanston. 
 
 When Louis Stevenson promised his father to 
 qualify for the Bar, he knew he could find ample 
 time conscientiously to pursue his legal studies ; 
 also devote many hours to his self-elected avocation 
 — learning to write. He did not care for out- 
 of-door relaxations. His pursuit of pleasure kept 
 him house-bound, for reading and writing were 
 his recreations. When cringing with cold, he gave 
 it as his opinion, " Life does not appear to me 
 to be an amusement adapted to this weather." 
 He found it was less bleak when the haggard 
 wintry day was done, and the lamps shone on 
 the rainy streets more warmly than the weakly 
 sun. Then, in the gloaming, when the castle 
 and the hills were limned against the pale 
 indigo sky, Robert Louis Stevenson took his 
 walks abroad. If a flaw of sunshine came amid 
 the prevailing bleakness of winter, he exulted 
 in its rays, and went forth gay and lively, 
 ready to frolic or bask in the sunlight. "To 
 travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive," 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 205 
 
 he said. The seemingly toilsome work to which 
 he had apprenticed himself, cheered him light- 
 heartedly on his way. "To have many aspira- 
 tions is to be spiritually rich/' he said, and 
 believing that to be the case, he was the richest 
 of millionaires. 
 
 Much time as he gave to his literary studies, 
 he did not neglect his promise to his father. 
 His legal coach, now a professor in the Edin- 
 burgh University, speaking of him lately, said 
 he found him an alert, interested, but, at the 
 same time, an erratic pupil. While expounding 
 to Louis some point which he ought to impress 
 on his memory, Louis's capricious attention had 
 been rivetted by some minor detail, — maybe it 
 was the history of the maker of the law, — and, 
 before he would continue his dry-as-dust study, he 
 would concentrate his energy on unearthing some 
 biographical fact, or in clothing some legal quibble 
 with a bright thread or two from the web of 
 his fancy. His note-book was never out of his 
 hand. " Wait, I'll jot that down in my own 
 words," he would say, or " What was that you 
 said I must not forget ? I had better note it too." 
 
206 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 His coach assured him he had a mastery of 
 his subject, and Louis smiled delightedly. He 
 then thought it would be as well to have two 
 strings to his bow. 
 
 " I want to succeed at the Bar," he said earnestly. 
 "Do you really think I am likely to?" 
 
 " We'll hear you yet before the First Division," 
 his tutor was saying, when the excitable Louis 
 sprang up, holding out his hands to stop him. 
 
 " Oh, don't," he cried, " don't please even speak 
 of such a thing ; I'd rather face death a thousand 
 times than stand up before these heavy-wigged, 
 red-robed solemnities. Euch ! The veriest thought 
 of such a thing makes me shiver to the marrow 
 of my bones " ; and he huddled himself into a 
 pitiable, teeth-chattering object, shaking his hair 
 over his face, and sank down, as if limp with 
 horror, into a seat. Then rising, he strode ner- 
 vously up and down the room, enlarging, with that 
 voluble speech of his, on his shyness, which, he 
 said, no one believed in. " I hate publicity ; I dread 
 publicity ; I simply could not stand up and plead." 
 This was a true statement, for his cousin says, 
 "After passing the examination for the Scottish 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 207 
 
 Bar, he appeared in the Parliament House with 
 his wig and gown, and here a tale is told of 
 his first case. He had merely, at a particular 
 time, to appear before the Judge, and intimate 
 some preliminary step in a case ; but when the 
 time came, his heart seemed to recoil from the 
 necessary phraseology, and he had to get a brother 
 lawyer to say the short sentence necessary." 
 In a private room Louis was the best of speakers, 
 no matter what subject was being discussed ; but 
 even at the "Speculative," when called on to 
 wag his usually almost too ready tongue, his 
 delivery was poor, though he had no lack of words ; 
 the circling action of his hands, which were 
 as part of his speech, had to be curtailed, for 
 if indulged in on a platform the exaggerated 
 nourishes moved the audience to laughter. Ridi- 
 cule was to Louis a deadly weapon. He was 
 fitted with no armour against its poignancy. 
 Before it he stood unarmed and naked. His 
 harmless, nafve vanity was specially liable to 
 hurts by ridicule. Never having associated much 
 with other children, he had not early run the 
 gauntlet of the cruelly candid speech, the in- 
 
zo8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 genious modes of teasing which they indulge 
 in, and to which they become case-hardened. 
 Louis, with an overbalance of sensitiveness, was 
 always touchily thin-skinned. He could not 
 bear publicity. A platform notoriety he shrank 
 from in terror, though he liked to create a 
 sensation in a roomful of friends. Although 
 he had the type of face we often see in dis- 
 tinguished actors, and for all his poor physique 
 had a grace of carriage, he would never have 
 shone on the stage ; for an unsympathetic 
 audience, a cold reception, not to speak of a 
 hiss, would have sent him flying to the wings in 
 nervous despair. 
 
 He was fond of private theatricals. It was 
 the one social amusement he was keen to partici- 
 pate in. He took particular delight in those 
 arranged by Prof. Fleeming Jenkin, but he was 
 well drilled into his rdle, and never had a very 
 prominent part to play. He had attended Professor 
 Jenkin's classes during the "vast pleasantry of 
 his curriculum " at Edinburgh University. He 
 could not in the professor of engineering's soul- 
 chilling classroom solace himself with restless 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 209 
 
 inattention as was his wont, for the professor, 
 " cocking his head like a terrier, with every mark 
 of the most engaging vivacity and readiness," 
 fixed an arresting eye on the youth. When he 
 came to beg this professor for a certificate of 
 attendance, he was refused. Louis had played 
 the truant to excess in his engineering studies. 
 Professor Blackie, when asked for a like certificate, 
 had looked at this student, noted for the first 
 time his unique look, and remarked that his 
 face was not familiar to him. At this uninten- 
 tional sarcasm Louis smiled, and the Greek 
 professor, liking sunny looks, smiled back, as he 
 amiably signed his name. Fleeming Jenkin was 
 not to be so readily cajoled, and informed his 
 erring pupil, who had lost many opportunities 
 for orthodox study, "You are no fool, and you 
 chose your course." But the conscientious pro- 
 fessor and the truant pupil became firm allies 
 when Louis had given in his decision at head- 
 quarters as to his resolution not to be an engineer. 
 This friendship was fraught with much good 
 for Louis. He was still among the " coiled per- 
 plexities of youth," and Fleeming Jenkin, from 
 
 14 
 
2io R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 his years and experience and sympathy, showed 
 him how to straighten out some of the tangled 
 skein. 
 
 They mutually appreciated an opponent who 
 would fight a well-parried duel of argument. 
 They had many tastes, many dislikes, in com- 
 mon. Both delighted in the heroics, in hearing 
 of valiant deeds, of ennobling thoughts. Both 
 found them stimulating. Both disliked golf, 
 and golf, says Louis, "is a cardinal virtue in 
 the City of the Winds." Nor did either of 
 them become an archer of the Queen's Body- 
 guard, "which is the Chiltern Hundreds of the 
 distasted golfer." Both were lovers of the stage. 
 The play that Fleeming Jenkin put on the boards 
 once a year gave to a certain coterie " a long and 
 an exciting holiday in mirthful company." 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson was pleased that her son, who 
 cared little for respectable company and for none 
 of Edinburgh's social gatherings, but railed unceas- 
 ingly at the buckram of a comfortable citizen's 
 life, had found a West-End house to his taste, 
 and she was glad of the warm friendship which 
 sprang up between the professor and her boy. 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 211 
 
 The professor had a good influence over Robert 
 Louis Stevenson when he was still supple and 
 immature enough to bend and improve under a 
 training hand. "I remember," records Louis, 
 " taking his advice upon some point of conduct. 
 ' Now,' said he, ' how do you suppose Christ would 
 have advised you ? ' and when I had answered 
 that He would not have counselled me anything 
 unkind or cowardly — * No,' he said, with one of 
 his shrewd strokes at the weakness of his hearer, 
 ' nor anything amusing.' " This frankly acknow- 
 ledged weakness led Louis into many flippant 
 perversions ; his " tricksy mocking " look bore 
 fruit in words. Professor Jenkin reminded Louis 
 when he was in a critical humour, picking holes 
 in other people's work, that, in Professor Blackie's 
 words, " All criticism worthy of the name is the 
 ripe fruit of combined intellectual insight and 
 long experience. Only an old soldier can tell 
 how battles ought to be fought. There is no 
 more sure sign of a shallow mind than the habit 
 of seeing always the ludicrous side of things." 
 
 Stevenson, in these embryo days, before he 
 had done any recognised work, was harder in 
 
212 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 his judgments than when his opinion was of 
 weight. His essay on Burns is a sample of his 
 sneeringly severe criticisms. He expressed a 
 wish when in Vailima that he could re-write his 
 paper on Robert Young, for, as he says, " His 
 profile was blurred in the boyish sketch. I should 
 like well to draw him again with a maturer touch." 
 He would have re-focussed Burns, too, for the 
 tooth of time gnawed away the hardness of youth, 
 and made him "more gently scan his brother 
 man." Stevenson sketched Robert Burns in his 
 untrained days, when he, who never had a sorrow 
 in his life, could not enter into the tragedy 
 of convivial Burns. Carlyle realized the 
 tragedy, and drew him as only a finished artist 
 can. When Louis had won his spurs, he looked 
 on the work of his fellow-knights, of those still 
 in the ranks, with the most lenient of eyes. 
 
 Louis Stevenson, though amenable to advice 
 and snubbing, if administered judiciously by those 
 he held not in awe but in respect, had very de- 
 cided opinions of his own, which he aired and 
 defended, not only among those of his age, but, 
 and what was very prejudicial to him, in the 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 213 
 
 face of his elders. Hearing him fearlessly attack 
 some reverend senior's pet foible, unsparing in his 
 thrusts, many would think young Stevenson was 
 contentious and uplifted, but when he came to 
 his own merits he was the most modest and un- 
 bragging of youths. He seldom spoke unkindly 
 of any one. If others did so in his presence, 
 love of battle and justice made him at once the 
 champion of those attacked. This desire to war 
 in words whenever chance offered, to advocate 
 theories, or contradict other folks, certainly made 
 him unpopular among those who did not know 
 him well. He remarked : " I was a very humble- 
 minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had 
 much credit for." 
 
 He was a lonely student. He had compara- 
 tively few acquaintances of his own age when he 
 left school. Mr. Baildon describes how he was 
 smuggled into Heriot Row, or met his friend in 
 the gardens, when they were schoolmates. To 
 "make believe" their scribbling tastes and talk 
 were contraband was like Louis, and he preferred 
 to smuggle his literary friend into his home, as 
 such a proceeding had an air of mystery about 
 
2i4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 it which was attractive. However, when his law 
 studies had begun, he took a less critical view 
 of everybody and everything, and lithesomeness of 
 spirits bubbled up in him. When free from the 
 fear of routine on an office stool, he began to find 
 that his contemporaries, grown out of the uninvit- 
 ing manners of their boyhood, were polished and 
 accomplished men whose friendship was worth 
 cultivating. The Speculative Society brought 
 him into intimate acquaintance with its members. 
 He speaks lovingly of it in some of his early 
 papers, and in the introduction to Kidnapped. 
 Archie Weir was a member of this august de- 
 bating society — an ancient and conservative body. 
 It had comfortable rooms within the University, 
 and Louis liked the olden customs it held to ; its 
 objections, for instance, to such innovations as 
 gas, and it adhered to its huge candelabrum of 
 wax lights. 
 
 In the early seventies Louis was twice presi- 
 dent of the "Speculative." He wrote several 
 papers for this society : " The Influence of the 
 Covenanting Persecution on the Scottish Mind" 
 (1871) ; " Notes on Paradise Lost " (1872) ; " Notes 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 215 
 
 on the Nineteenth Century " and " Two Questions 
 on the Relations between Christ's Teaching and 
 Modern Christianity" (1873); "Law and Free 
 Will— Notes on the Duke of Argyll." " Specula- 
 tive evenings," he said, " form pretty salient mile- 
 stones on our intellectual journey ; looking back 
 along mine, I see a good deal of distance got 
 over — whether well or ill I am not here to judge." 
 He tells how, after his introductory evening there, 
 he made a speech in a state of " nervous exalta- 
 tion that we have no language strong enough 
 to describe. My electricity," he says, "seemed 
 negative. I had no common interests with the 
 others, no old stories to retell, any remark was a 
 hazardous experiment ; and 1 ended my night 
 by walking home alone, in the blackness of de- 
 spondency. How I should have laughed any one 
 to scorn who had stopped me then on the Bridges 
 and told me that I should spend in that Society 
 some of the happiest hours of my life, and make 
 friends from among those very members who were 
 now so forbiddingly polite ! " This quotation is 
 from his Valedictory Address, given in March, 
 1872. In it he indulged in some speculation as 
 
216 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 to great writers who might arise from among 
 those present now, such as " The Spec." had 
 cradled in former years, for famous men had 
 been among its members. No one thought j 
 that the frail, boyish composer of that speech / 
 would ever be more than a dilettante in the pro- 
 fession of letters — an advocate with private means, 
 no inclination to practise, and a leaning towards 
 literature. "And who knows, gentlemen, with 
 what Scotts or Jeffreys we may have been sharing 
 this meeting-hall, about what great man we shall 
 have curious anecdotes to tell over dining-tables, 
 and write to their biographers in a fine, shaky 
 octogenarian hand ? We shall have many stories, 
 too, of fellow-members who did not come to the 
 surface in after life, but, it may be, went straight- 
 way to the bottom — many ' vivas to those who 
 have failed and to those whose war vessels sank 
 in the sea.' Yes, if we should have here some 
 budding Scott, or if the new Shakespeare should 
 here be incubating his fine parts, we shall all, 
 gentlemen, have a hand in the finished article — 
 some thoughts of ours, or at least some way of 
 thinking, will have taken hold upon his mind, 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 217 
 
 some seasonable repartee, some happy word, will 
 have fallen into the ' good soil ' of his genius, and 
 will afterwards bring forth an hundredfold. We 
 shall all have had a hand, I repeat, at making 
 that Shakespeare or that Scott." 
 
 While he figured constantly at the " Spec," and 
 was a sought-for guest at the members' dinners, 
 'L. S. Stoneven" had not written again, but 
 papers were appearing in the Cornhill and else- 
 where signed " R. L. S." In the Speculative 
 Society Roll Book he signed himself Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, and in a note states what his 
 baptismal name really was. At that time he 
 wrote to the " Spec." secretary a letter of four 
 pages of comic pomposity, giving his reasons for 
 diverging from his registered one of Lewis Bal- 
 four, and announcing his intention to make that 
 of " Robert Louis " famous. 
 
 How well he succeeded is recorded in the His- 
 tory of Our Own Times. Mr. Justin Macarthy thus 
 sums up his work : " Stevenson, judged impar- 
 tially by his own works, was undoubtedly one of 
 the greatest English writers during the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century. He stole quietly into 
 
218 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the world of fame. He endeared himself to the 
 whole of the reading public of English-speaking 
 countries. His work was always essentially his 
 own inspiration, and was carried out by his own 
 mode of treatment. He created situations rather 
 than characters, but when he set about drawing 
 a character he drew with the firm and steady 
 hand of a master. There was nothing oblique or 
 vague about him. What he saw he saw, and 
 what he saw he could describe. If that is not 
 to be an artist, then we, at least, have no idea 
 what an artist is." 
 
Legal and Literary Training 
 
" The powers and the ground of friendship are a mystery, 
 but looking back I can discern in part we loved the thing 
 he was, for some shadow of what he was to be." 
 
 — Memories and Portraits. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 Legal and Literary Training 
 
 RAPIDLY, in these years of legal study, he 
 was obtaining more and more the com- 
 mand of fluent expression in language, for he 
 says, " As I walked, my mind was busy fitting 
 what I saw with appropriate words ; when I sat 
 by the roadside I would either read, or a pencil 
 and a penny version book would be in my hand, 
 to note down the features of the scene, or com- 
 memorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived 
 with words." The result of this close communion 
 with words is to be found in the various papers 
 he contributed to Cornhill, papers which have 
 since become famous in collected form as Vir- 
 ginibus Puerisque. They were, he said, like 
 "milestones on the wayside of my life." To 
 those who knew him in these past days to re- 
 
222 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 read them is to travel again the same road in 
 the same good company. It was early in the 
 seventies that we first knew Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, for though we had been nearly 
 opposite neighbours all our lives, watching the 
 same Leerie light the lamps, he never chanced 
 to play in the division of gardens which we 
 patronized, nor did he live much in Heriot Row 
 in spring or summer, when the green grounds 
 became the meeting place of neighbouring 
 children. His square of gardens had for a centre- 
 piece a pond, our envy. In the middle of this 
 circular scrap of water is a very limited and 
 rocky islet. When we told Louis how we had 
 coveted that pond he sympathised. He said he 
 had longed to invade that mimic eyot, and. he 
 had to wait till frost paved a way. He in turn 
 envied our pleasaunce when we recounted to 
 him the joys we had had from the making of 
 " posies." They were not bouquets of flowers, as 
 their name might lead one unversed to suppose, 
 but holes dug in the grass and cunningly covered 
 over with turf, so that it needed a trained eye 
 to discover the site of the pit. In these posies, 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 223 
 
 which were usually made at some hour when the 
 gardens were empty, were put " peeries," marbles, 
 or our favourite tin soldiers. The owners rose 
 betimes to see if their hidden treasure was still 
 secure. Once, some good fairy put sixpence into 
 a posie, and much astonished was the recipient. 
 Louis would have committed all his worldly 
 wealth to the earth if he had dug one. There 
 was a secretiveness and a pleasurable anxiety 
 about posies which our vivacious friend gauged, 
 though he did not hear of them until he was 
 out of his teens. 
 
 When Louis was a sleepless boy, Cummy used 
 to pull aside the blind and show him Queen 
 Street, on a higher terrace opposite, across what 
 he called " the great gulf of darkness," made by 
 the Heriot Row gardens. Its street lamps shone 
 reassuringly, and Louis, wondering if there were 
 any other children denied the gift of sleep, noted 
 there was one house opposite where a light burned 
 every night. 
 
 He felt a consoling companionship in that 
 gleam which came from our old home, 52, Queen 
 Street. My father burned the midnight oil in 
 
224 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 his room high up in that once busy house, for 
 night was the only opportunity he had, in the 
 toilful twenty-four hours, to read and study. Ten 
 years before the time when Louis tossed restless 
 with fever, hearing all night "the wind in- 
 tone" in that house, early one morning, after 
 much search, my father found the blessed 
 anaesthetic qualities of chloroform, and was 
 lulled by this syrup of sleep into controllable 
 unconsciousness for the first time. In 1870 our 
 old home at Queen Street was broken up by 
 the death of our parents, and we moved to a 
 smaller house not very far distant. Mutual law 
 studies and the Speculative brought Louis and my 
 brother together. " The Republic," R. L. S. called 
 our new abode, where the members were of an 
 independent equality, which seemed to Louis a 
 preferable arrangement to the shackles of mon- 
 archical ties, for at that period he owns, " the 
 unrejoicing faces of his elders filled him with con- 
 temptuous surprise." He would air his convictions 
 with uncurbed freedom in the republic, where 
 there was no one oppressed and sage with the 
 weight of years to damp his ardour by telling 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 225 
 
 him he babbled nonsense. As he himself said, 
 he heard his voice echo years after " in the empty 
 vestibule of youth." He would frequently drop 
 into dinner with us, and of an evening he had 
 the run of the smoking-room. After ten p.m., 
 when a stern old servant, who held by monarchical 
 discipline, and kept a watchful guard over the 
 republic, went to rest, the " open sesame " to 
 our door was a rattle on the letter box. Louis's 
 fancy for the mysterious was whetted by this 
 admittance by secret sign, and we liked his 
 special rat-a-tat,; for it was the forerunner of an 
 hour or two of talk which he described as "the 
 harmonious speech of two or more," by far the 
 most accessible of pleasures, and the society talk 
 of even the most brilliant man is of greatly less 
 account than what you will get from him (as the 
 French say) in a " little committee." His studies, 
 his notions, his hopes, he described with a nimble 
 tongue which he accentuated by his flourishing 
 actions, the " speaking gestures " of his thin, 
 nervously formed hands. He often marvelled 
 that these hands were not taken into considera- 
 tion when he was an amateur emigrant, and was 
 
 IS 
 
226 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 mistaken for everything under the sun except 
 an educated gentleman. He says, his fellow- 
 passengers, who classed him as a working-man 
 seeking occupation and health in a new world, 
 did not observe his hands, for the only tool they 
 could hold was the pen. Then he was "always 
 supposing." As a " callant " at college, one of 
 his fellow-students says, as they walked out into 
 the muddy-streeted, cold town, he varied the 
 monotony of the way down to Princes Street by 
 " supposings." " If you were walking along the 
 street with him," wrote this companion, "and 
 the most trivial thing struck his eye, he would 
 start supposing ; in fact, there was no end to his 
 supposing, and I suppose that is how he got 
 to the top of the tree in fiction." 
 
 Others who came into the "little committee" 
 by our library hearth might be tired, depressed, 
 and sit still, enjoying a consoling pipe. Louis 
 never was glum. He might be in the depth of 
 dejection, but it was such magnified drooping of 
 body and soul as to be farcical. Then, when 
 laughter greeted him, the grotesque sombreness 
 dispersed like a cloud before sunshine, and he 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 227 
 
 threw off his cut-throat-looking Spanish cloak, 
 stood erect with a smile hovering about his long 
 eyes, as well as on his tricksy mouth. Quiet he 
 never remained. He could not resist putting in 
 a word. Still, for all his love of talking, he was 
 also a good listener, never showing boredom, and 
 anxious to grasp the meaning of other speakers, 
 assisting with tactful and sympathetic interest 
 from out of his own overflowing vocabulary. He 
 was always ready to add to his list of words, or 
 glean insight from his friends' notions. If others 
 were silent, he had a perfect cataract of thoughts, 
 'i of supposings, to pour out, and he seized the 
 opportunity to clothe them in words befitting his 
 fastidious taste. Full of perpetual motion, and 
 for ever walking up and down as he spoke, or 
 adding action to his words, never sitting placidly 
 still, his constant unrest was not distracting or 
 annoying. He flitted about with a womanly 
 cunning, never stumbled over a stool, upbraided 
 an unoffending sofa for being in the road, or 
 committed the heinous crime of treading on the 
 dogs. He might pace up and down, jump up as 
 if electrified to expound some fresh frolicsome 
 
228 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 fancy, but our mastiff and other dogs remained 
 unconcerned, for they had learned that he would 
 gingerly pick his steps among their paws, and 
 there was no necessity to move from the warmest 
 vantage ground on the rug, or prepare to lay 
 hold of a disturbing element in the shape of 
 a leg, a defence against aggressive feet which 
 was permitted to our veteran terrier by reason 
 of his toothlessness. 
 
 Louis's outlandishness of dress, his mannerisms, 
 his frenchified flourishing of his hands, and his 
 transparent modes of attracting attention, used 
 to come in for derisive condemnation. We 
 observed that he employed particular Steven- 
 son ian stratagems in order never to remain long 
 in the background. If the ceaseless ability he 
 displayed in wagging that easily set-agoing tongue 
 of his did not make any impression on his hearers, 
 if his prominent position in front of fire with 
 his cigarette, more waved in semi-circles as he 
 chattered than legitimately smoked, drew on 
 him no special notice or remark, or purposely to 
 bait him, his most pronounced eccentricities passed 
 unheeded, he cast his fertile mind about to devise 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 229 
 
 means to bring himself to the fore. One rare 
 occasion, when he had on a dress coat, and came 
 in to us on his way home, he gravely asked leave 
 to take off his swallow-tail and sit in his shirt- 
 sleeves. This was really more a ruse to bring 
 himself before the "little committee" than to 
 ease himself of the garment which he vowed 
 oppressed him, for when leave was granted, no 
 astonishment expressed, and his coat folded 
 with laudable carefulness and relegated to a 
 back seat, a shadow of such evident chagrin flitted 
 over his face that it was all that the plotters 
 could do to refrain from laughing, and so en- 
 courage their victim. For all these whimsical 
 mannerisms he had to endure a deal' of taunt- 
 ing. He protested against the injustice of our 
 accusations, but he never took offence at them, 
 though he defended himself in a manner which 
 should have done him honour if he had pled as . 
 well before his dreaded Lords of Session. It 
 did not become a youth of his years, we held, to 
 • dress in such a mountebankish style. 
 
 Professor Blackie, for instance, because of his 
 silver locks and his recognised and honoured 
 
2 3 o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 position, could, without mockery, wear a plaid 
 over a frock-coat, and. march along Princes 
 Street beating time with his famed kail runt staff 
 to the Songs of the North he crooned as he went. 
 Strangers turned and gazed at the picturesque 
 professor, and that was perhaps what he wanted. 
 But we explained to Stevenson that it was 
 forward audaciousness on his part to affect lank 
 locks, slouch hat, and garments so incongruous 
 and shabby as to be remarkable. " He always 
 wore his hair long, and frequently looked any- 
 thing but "groomed, but one mental picture is in- 
 delibly printed in my mind : a flannel shirt, not 
 over clean, a black and white straw hat that 
 was well ventilated and had seen much service, 
 no waistcoat, but round his middle a red and 
 black scarf with two ends hanging down behind 
 and showing just below the skirt of his jacket, 
 the scarf functioning both as a ' cummerband ' and 
 also in lieu of suspenders," a contemporary and 
 friend wrote of him at Hyeres. His clothes in 
 his Edinburgh days were not much, if any, better. 
 His flannel shirts attracted the smuts of wintry 
 weather. In vain his companions showed how 
 
LEGAL .AND LITERARY TRAINING 231 
 
 starched linen withstood the assaults of grime. 
 In Edinburgh he could not rid himself of a 
 waistcoat, but an overcoat, such as his friends 
 sheltered themselves beneath in winter, was, we 
 said, what he ought to wear, The cloak he 
 preferred, to the handier garment suggested, was 
 not suited for him of all people, delicate chested 
 as he was. Such a cloak, too, in a wind-swept city 
 like Auld Reekie was dangerously draughty. 
 
 Nothing annoyed him more than our state- 
 ment that his curious taste in dress, which made 
 him appear a starveling play actor, was an eccen- 
 tricity he cultivated to draw attention to his 
 genius. When his uncut hair hung below his 
 newly donned advocate's wig, he heard a hearty 
 laugh as he, for the first time, "added to the 
 interminable patter of legal feet" in the Parlia- 
 ment House. It excited his curiosity. He asked 
 the reason. It was explained to him that an 
 inquiring legal senior had asked, as Robert Louis 
 Stevenson passed, who was " the marvellous boy, 
 the new Chatterton " ? That name, received from 
 the ready legal jester, was nearly the means of 
 persuading him to go and have his hair fashion- 
 ably shorn. 
 
232 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Teasing jibes, which he received in a bountiful 
 supply, were, he was told, for his ultimate good. 
 If he had been brought up with a band of 
 brothers, these small conceits would have been 
 nipped in the bud in the nursery. He was told 
 he should be grateful for home truths, but after 
 a severe shower of chaff he would sadly throw 
 away his cigarette, wind himself in his cloak, 
 and go off with an elaborate bow and with a 
 tragic droop of his sombrely shrouded form. To 
 his credit be it said, he bore no ill-will. Next 
 evening he would return exultant over some new 
 suggestion he had to make. 
 
 It was always a source of wonderment, and 
 no inquisitorial cross-questioning could extract 
 the information, why Louis's clothes were never 
 seen with the gloss of newness on them. They 
 were always worn where his angular joints were 
 traceable through the cloth. He scorned to reply 
 when asked at what pawnshop he acquired them 
 in this second-hand condition. His excessive 
 attenuation gave the idea that he had a scarcity 
 of under-garments on below his rubbed velveteen 
 and the poverty-stricken trousers. He looked 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 233 
 
 like a skeleton draped in a sheet. One winter 
 he wore flannel shirts and turned-down collars 
 to match, so funereal in colour that he was usually 
 credited with committing the crime of walking 
 in Princes Street with blaok shirts. He' vowed 
 they were blue, but the blue was of a coal-like 
 shade. When he first appeared in our library 
 wearing one of them, he was flattered with the 
 commotion it created. It certainly added to his 
 vagabondish appearance. He expounded its 
 merits for a crusoeing expedition. For instance, 
 it would never look soiled, he said, forgetful that 
 it never looked clean. The suggestion that he 
 should visibly number, or have various different 
 designs embroidered on them, so as to let anxious 
 friends know when he assumed a fresh one, 
 damped his delight in them. A skull and cross- 
 bones was thought of as a fitting emblem for one 
 piratical shirt. He had been radiant over this 
 new freak in his wardrobe, but he was so railed 
 at that he left in high dudgeon, buttoning his 
 docked velveteen jacket over the offending gar- 
 ment. Twice he was seen in conventional, brand- 
 new suits. He looked well in them, for the tailors 
 
234 R- L- STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 artfully banished for once his poorly fed, poorly 
 clad appearance. He always had a starving-of- 
 cold look, for with his contracted chest and 
 huddled-up shoulders he seemed to gather him- 
 self together for warmth. Mrs. Stevenson ap- 
 proved of her son's Samoan photographs. He 
 turned over a new leaf in smartness as to dress 
 in Vailima, for he writes : " I am now very dandy ; 
 I announced two years ago that I should change. 
 Slovenly youth all right — not slovenly age. So 
 really now I'm pretty spruce; always a white 
 shirt, white necktie, fresh shave, silk socks ; oh ! 
 a great sight." In his loose flannels, and standing 
 erect before the camera, he looked more vigorous 
 and broader than his wont. Mr. Payn, in the 
 introduction to Miss Fraser's In Stevenson's 
 Samoa, speaking of a group at Vailima, says, 
 " In the frontispiece I recognise at once the com- 
 manding figure of my old friend standing by his 
 horse." In my recollection Louis was never com- 
 manding. To use a Scotch word, for which there 
 is no English equivalent, he had a " shilpit " look, 
 which is starveling, crined, ill-thriven, all in one 
 and more. 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 235 
 
 Both his father and mother had a fine, com- 
 manding presence : Mr. Stevenson square and 
 massive, Mrs. Stevenson upright and elegant ; but 
 Louis had a timid, almost apologetic air. So 
 much so that when he used to come in with his 
 head bent forward, glancing alertly from side to 
 side, and treading with a stealthy carefulness, one 
 of our family dubbed him' the "guinea fowl." On 
 other occasions he would enter, flinging the door 
 wide open, stepping springingly, his hands up- 
 lifted, as if he were the forerunner of some 
 triumphant procession. Notwithstanding his 
 spidery figure, his badly knitted, weedy frame, he 
 moved with a quiet quickness, and stood with 
 such a lithe ease of pose that he struck one as 
 graceful. 
 
 He suffered for his grotesque taste in dress 
 when abroad. He was for ever being arrested. 
 " For the life of me I cannot understand it," 
 he exclaims, after enumerating some woes, how 
 travelling without a passport he was " cast, with- 
 out any figure about the matter, into noisome 
 dungeons " ; how, even with a passport, no official 
 would believe him to be a Briton. Mistaken for 
 
236 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 a pedlar, he was refused admittance at inns. As 
 a spy he was stopped at frontiers, and there is 
 no absurd and disreputable means of livelihood 
 but has been attributed to him in some heat of 
 official or popular distrust. 
 
 When going Across the Plains, two men on 
 the cars had a bet as to whether he was an out- 
 of-work musician or no ; and one, to put his sug- 
 gestion to the test, offered him a place in the 
 orchestra of a local theatre. This manager lost 
 five dollars by his wrong guess, and Louis says, 
 " liquated the debt at the bar." He owns in the 
 Epilogue of the Inland Voyage, when the travellers 
 set out on a fresh tour on foot, that he was un- 
 wisely dressed. He had an Indian embroidered 
 smoking cap on his head, its golden lace and 
 tassels frayed and tarnished. He wore a piratical 
 shirt, already spoken of, which he says was " of 
 an agreeable dark hue which the satirical called 
 black, a light tweed coat made by a good English 
 tailor, and a pair of ready-made linen trousers 
 and leathern gaiters." 
 
 This was about 1876, and spies and the war 
 were fresh in the. official mind. The poor con- 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 237 
 
 tents of the prisoner's pockets, his excitable 
 manner, his fluency in French, more than ever 
 assured the gendarme that he was right to arrest 
 the strange wayfarer. His companion's more 
 steady pace not suiting Louis's longer strides, they 
 each walked alone. Cigarette came along with 
 a sturdy step, bearing the certificate of his 
 nationality in his face and address. The officials 
 recognised him at a glance as a British 
 subject. The Commissionary, who had ordered 
 the arrest of the suspected spy's companion, 
 was flabbergasted at the new prisoner's appear- 
 ance : his purse well filled, his passport cor- 
 rect, and dapperly dressed from head to heel, 
 en suite, in grey clothes of an unmistakable 
 Anglo-Saxon cut. They had to forego further 
 travels and return to Paris forthwith, for the 
 officials decided it was well to rid themselves of 
 the mystery and sent them to headquarters. 
 Even this, and several other adventures of the 
 same species, failed to persuade Louis that his 
 taste in clothes was striking. Many think he 
 was careless in regard to dress. That was not 
 so. He gave much thought and time towards 
 
238 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 the getting together of his ill-assorted wardrobe. 
 His friend at Hyeres, already quoted, says, " If 
 he was careless in dressing himself, he was keenly 
 appreciative of excellence in others." Samoa, for 
 the liberty and range in fantastic dressing its 
 customs allowed him, must for that reason 
 alone have suited him. To have, in lieu of 
 swallow-tail coats, wreaths of flowers to wear on 
 ceremonious occasions, was to him, indeed, an 
 " engaging barbarism." He stuck to the last to 
 his ideas of ease and taste in dress, for he died 
 in his sailor's jumper. 
 
 The two occasions on which he wore new, 
 well-made suits dwelt in the memory of his 
 contemporaries. He had promised to officiate as 
 groomsman at a friend's marriage. He allowed 
 himself to be led to the tailor's and have his 
 clothes ordered for him. Their rigidity terrified 
 him. He begged for a velvet collar and cuffs to 
 a frock coat, a gayer waistcoat ; but his tailor, 
 backed by his two boon companions who had 
 escorted him to prevent escape, remonstrated : 
 " On this occasion, Mr. Stevenson, you must allow 
 me to use my judgment; you can order what 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 239 
 
 vagaries you choose when you have only yourself 
 to please." This rebuke from the man of scissors 
 quelled him. He dressed for this feast at our 
 house, as his people were at Swanston, and the 
 bridegroom feared, unless under surveillance to 
 the last, he might appear in his usual docked 
 velveteen jacket. But he was childishly interested 
 in these novel clothes. He felt so strange in 
 orthodox attire that we had difficulty in persuad- 
 ing him we were not chaffing when we did not 
 laugh, when he, holding himself erect, strutted 
 in. Just as we thought he was safely started 
 for his post of duty, he rushed back and stood 
 on a chair to see himself once more in a side- 
 board mirror, and, with a smile of incredulity, he 
 sallied forth, apprehensive of hearing jeers from 
 an astonished populace. He came in one Sunday 
 evening, saying he had gone to church with his 
 parents in these wedding garments. He was 
 honestly chagrined that they had commended his 
 appearance, and he kept marvelling that what to 
 him was a singular garb had drawn no wondering 
 notice down on his tall-hatted head. 
 
 The other suit of feasible clothes he was cajoled 
 
2 4 o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 into ordering cost him a mauvais quart d'heure. 
 They were singularly light-coloured tweeds, and 
 he wore them one day that he joined us in 
 London. He made frequent calls on us to ad- 
 mire him, and we flattered and praised their make, 
 for in them and that wedding garment (which he 
 was never seen to wear again since his church- 
 going in them was not considered a joke) he 
 looked slight and graceful. The padding hid 
 his high shoulders, and good cutting hid his spare- 
 ness. Walking up the pathway by Holland 
 House, some smuts fell, and Stevenson scudded 
 like a ghost in his light robes along the alley 
 till, breathless, he stopped, and gaspingly asked, 
 " Have any blacks fallen on my angel clothes ? " 
 The question suggested a means to chastise him 
 for overweening pride. We pretended to remove 
 the offending body from the angelic coat — abused 
 the clumsiness of an assisting brother for smudg- 
 ing the biggest smut on the victim's shoulder. 
 Louis walked on, sadly ill at ease. We were 
 possessed by demons of mischief : we rubbed in 
 that imaginary smudge by condoling and suggest- 
 ing remedies, while Louis tried to see the extent 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 241 
 
 of the blemish in plate-glass windows. We were 
 cruel. His pained, nearly weeping, expression 
 only urged us on to further flights of fancy, till 
 he tore off his angel coat in High Street, 
 Kensington. Seeing it still whitely immaculate, 
 the weight of anxiety passed off his face. Then 
 he cast a reproachful glance at us, and, with a 
 forgiving smile, said, "Eh- — you two brutes — to 
 misquote a well-known author." After deliber- 
 ating whether the spring sunshine were warm 
 enough to allow him to continue the walk in his 
 shirt-sleeyes, he very leisurely resumed his coat, 
 and the crowd which was gathering dispersed. 
 That " angel " jacket (so called from its extreme 
 lightness in colour) was the one he was arrested 
 in the same autumn at Chatillon-sur-Loire, but 
 by that season it had lost its delicate freshness 
 and was grimy with travel-stains ; so, worn along 
 with the shirt of an " agreeable dark hue," turned 
 rusty in the tub, the coat could no longer be 
 classed as a heavenly garment. 
 
 Louis kicked somewhat too vehemently against 
 the pricks when he was in the heart of the 
 twenties. He had a hankering for the sunshine 
 
 16 
 
242 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 and the South, and to be free of the inanities of 
 custom ; but, after all, he acknowledges the " old 
 land is still the true love," and roving fancies 
 are but "pleasant infidelities." The impetuous, 
 wayward youth had really his lines allotted to 
 him in very comfortable places. His home was 
 certainly in a climate he disliked, but he had 
 to own his native town was fair to look upon. 
 He could, within ten minutes' walk of the west 
 end of Princes Street, hear the peewits crying 
 along the furrows, in fields bordering the Queens- 
 ferry Road, and even "in the thickest of our 
 streets, the country hill-tops find out a young 
 man's eyes, and set his heart beating for travel 
 and pure air." He had means to idle, and leisure 
 in spring and autumn vacations to travel where 
 he willed. During April, August, and September 
 neither law court sits, and college gates are 
 closed, so he was free to roam. So, though many 
 think he was uncongenially situated in his home, 
 the uncongenialness was more the perverse fret- 
 ting of youth against the necessary harness of 
 discipline than the actual reality. 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 243 
 
 He encouraged himself to eschew such amuse- 
 ments as came in his legitimate way. Balls he 
 refused to attend, because he had to abandon his 
 usual clothes and go in regulation dress suit, which, 
 he boasted, stank in his nostrils. Not even fancy 
 balls, which would have given him full scope for 
 fantastic dressing, tempted him. He took the 
 greatest interest in his companions' costumes, for 
 he was quick to notice appropriate clothing on 
 others. Before one fancy ball, an Edinburgh daily 
 paper supplied ticket-givers with schedules for 
 their guests to fill in with descriptions of their 
 characters. Louis spent a happy afternoon with 
 us " supposing " many staid, religious citizens were 
 going as very remarkable characters. With dress 
 to suit their parts the tempting schedules were 
 supplied. One man of aldermanic proportions 
 we dressed " As Chieftain of the Puddin' Race " in 
 haggis tartan. It was a wet afternoon, and we 
 all assisted to robe many unsuspected ball-goers. 
 No one enjoyed acting as Master of the Robes 
 more heartily than Robert Louis Stevenson. The 
 President of our Republic, feeling a sudden weight 
 of responsibility, sadly owned later that he had 
 
244 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 thought it wiser to call on the Editor and remove 
 these carefully concocted descriptions, for the un- 
 invited guests might not see the jest in a proper 
 light. They were all in type when they were 
 brought back and ruefully committed to the 
 flames. 
 
 Acrostics that winter, appearing in the World, 
 engrossed our time. There was an E — U to be 
 guessed. One who had been busy at the fancy 
 ball schedules promptly said, " I know, Elihu the 
 son of Tisphat." Louis was charmed at this ready 
 invention, and walked up and down congratulating 
 the coiner of names, " After my Maker, Elihu 
 the son of Tisphat has always commanded my 
 reverence," he declared. The inventor of Elihu 
 was one of three sisters all noted for talking. We 
 
 often wondered " If Louis and the G 's met, 
 
 who would speak most ? " They did meet, and 
 the three ladies, as usual, all spoke volubly and 
 at once, and the room was a babble of laughter 
 and voices. Louis's was dumb, for he could not 
 be heard. When they left the dining-room, up 
 he sprang, radiant with a new " supposing." " Sup- 
 pose I was a Turk," he said, " and married to all 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 245 
 
 three Miss G 's*at once, would I turn deaf or 
 
 dumb ? " 
 
 His attendance at conventional entertainments 
 was as rare as his suit of properly cut clothes, 
 occasions to be remembered. For the ordinary 
 dinner-party he had no stomach — Babylonish 
 feasts he called them. Sometimes when he came 
 into his " little committee '' other members of it 
 might have returned from what he characterized 
 as Noah's Ark dinner-parties. He always inquired 
 what other beasts they had gone in to feed with, 
 two and two, and what talking entertainment the 
 animal they had been paired with had treated 
 them to. The flowers and dresses sported on such 
 occasions also interested him. " The table was 
 all blobs of purple and yellow things," said one, 
 lighting his pipe and glad to be in his smoking- 
 jacket again. " You mean violets and primroses ?" 
 suggested another. " Spring," said Louis, jumping 
 up. He spoke for long of the joys of the opening 
 year, for the mention of the woodland firstlings 
 was as a breath ot the country to him. If our 
 friend did not like stiff banquets, he did not debar 
 himself from unconventional ones. On my birth- 
 
246 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 day in December, having with* some friends been 
 bitten with a mania for the culinary art, we de- 
 cided to cook the natal feast ourselves to show 
 our lately acquired prowess. Robert Louis Ste- 
 venson promptly accepted his invitation to this 
 dinner, and helped at making a code of rules. 
 We decided, if we cooked, the men must wait. 
 Whether those who were to be butlers were to 
 appear in evening clothes or not was long dis- 
 cussed, and finally decided in the affirmative. We 
 cooks were to dine in our aprons. (We took the 
 precaution to have a fresh supply for dining-room 
 use.) The cook and housemaid had a holiday, 
 and some ten of us took possession of a clean 
 kitchen. Our old servant Jarvis retired to the 
 seclusion of his pantry. He had been lenient, but 
 somewhat contemptuous of this "ploy," and as 
 curious as ourselves as to the result of our en- 
 deavours. He would only vouchsafe a well-known 
 adage in regard to the number of cooks and the 
 broth. Unless some untoward accident befel it, 
 my mind was at rest about the said broth, for 
 its nature had necessitated the previous prepara- 
 tion of its stock. My comrades were coached as 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 247 
 
 to its ingredients ; so, if any guest cast doubts 
 on it being of our own making, we would glibly 
 dumbfound them with our knowledge of what was 
 "intiPt." We decorated the dinner table so as 
 to prevent, in case ot accidents, absolute starva- 
 tion. We had loaves on the sideboard, and a couple 
 of round Dutch cheeses on the table among the 
 desert. The cheeses, with their ruddiness, lent 
 themselves to decoration, and a 'prentice hand at 
 sculpture fashioned them into a semblance of 
 a bucolic face. We covered their bald scalps with 
 bristling celery, and softened the prominent hard- 
 ness of their brows by fringes of cress. The cook 
 returned in time to dish our dinner, and Jarvis 
 meanly ushered her in, to see her start of horror 
 when she beheld a rockery of pans piled below 
 the table, and a slide of grease over her white 
 floor. He grimly enjoyed her surprise ; I did 
 not, for I knew I had to face her next morning, 
 without the protection of guests. When she came 
 in we were all busily engaged in picking up the 
 potatoes ; the pot they were in, being too heavy 
 for novices' arms, had upset, and half its contents 
 were flying over the slippery floor, half were 
 
z 4 8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 seeking death by drowning in a much-choked sink. 
 We captured the runaways and applied resuscita- 
 ting measures to the drowned. The dinner was 
 a success ; the food varied, but the spirits and 
 the good-will of the guests kept high and steady. 
 No one entered more fully into the fun of the 
 feast than Louis Stevenson. As it was a species 
 of fancy dress affair, he came in " waiter's " clothes, 
 but softened their stiffness by a newspaper 
 cap and a white apron. He received the dishes 
 at the door, and introduced the viands with a 
 preface, at which he was as ready with his tongue 
 as with his pen. We cooks promptly complained 
 of the waiting, which was wrong-sided and spas- 
 modic. Louis conveyed an entrde in a grand 
 march round the room with much high-stepping ; 
 but he was so engaged in talking that he was 
 as awkward as his clumsy brother waiters at 
 serving it. 
 
 Sometimes, when he took pot luck with us, and 
 seasoned our dinner with good company, he would 
 be so busy holding forth on some new theory that 
 a dish would wait at his elbow for a length of 
 time Jarvis thought inadvisable. The old man 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 249 
 
 would give it what he called a shuggle to attract 
 attention, and that failing, break out with " Hoot, 
 sir, gang on wi your dinner or let ithers gang." 
 Louis tried this " shuggle." Jarvis had always the 
 cloth in his mind, but the new waiter had not. 
 A point of the feast was reached when a new 
 supply of forks was needed. To Jarvis, to " scart 
 his siller" was a crime of deepest dye. Our 
 faithful tyrant's forbearance broke down when he 
 caught sight pf " yon laddie Stevenson " dealing 
 forks (mixed with knives) like cards : " I'll wait 
 on the twenty o' ye, but gi'e me my siller; I 
 canna hae it dadded," he cried. Stevenson, who 
 flattered himself he was assuming the role of 
 waiter to perfection, whisking about with a napkin 
 under his arm, was loth to retire. He begged to 
 be allowed to serve an apprenticeship as foot- 
 man under Jarvis ; but he would have " no such 
 daft-like" assistant. He commanded Louis, who 
 was one of his favourites, to resume his seat and 
 behave " weise-like." Then he meanly said that 
 if Mr. Stevenson had not been mixing, the knives 
 and silver together, he would have noticed that 
 none of the ladies had taken potatoes, and added : 
 
250 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 " I ken why." Louis abandoned his warfare — his 
 hopes of a butlership, and fell into his seat. He 
 said he wished to know the worst at once, and 
 begged Jarvis, as a staunch friend and the only 
 grey-headed one among us, to tell him the truth, 
 and the story of the " couping " of the potatoes 
 was revealed. Louis sat sad and silent for a brief 
 space, and vowed he would turn cannibal and eat 
 a human-headed cheese, but recovered when the 
 happy thought occurred to him to make the cooks 
 taste first, and he supposed himself to be an 
 Emperor who only by caution could avoid a 
 poisoned dish. The crackers, which were among 
 a somewhat unusual dessert, were as great a joy 
 to Louis as they would have been if he had gone 
 back a decade or two in his life. The varied caps 
 in which the company dressed themselves plea- 
 sured him as much as if he were again a flushed 
 and fluttered child in blouse and socks. Crowns 
 were too large, mitres nearer his size, but he 
 hankered after the jester's cap. A pair of match- 
 holders, with frogs climbing up their sides, have 
 lived twenty years and more on my mantelpiece. 
 Louis brought them up to the drawing-room that 
 
LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING 231 
 
 evening, bearing one aloft in each hand, to lay 
 them literally at my feet with an Eastern obei- 
 sance. We finished our party off with a dance. 
 Louis seldom danced in an Edinburgh drawing- 
 room after he got into swallow-tails, but the 
 motley assemblage of cooks and waiters in many- 
 coloured head-gear, suited his particular taste, 
 and he footed it merrily at that irregular gathering, 
 which left behind it laughter-moving memories 
 for many long years. 
 
Life at Twenty-five 
 
" To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying 
 Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is 
 to have kept your soul alive.'' 
 
 — The Inland Voyage. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Life at Twenty-five 
 
 ' I THOUGH we chaffed him sorely on his "ec- 
 -*- centricities of genius," we never found fault 
 with his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm so infectious 
 and refreshing. He was always brimful of new 
 impressions, a rabid Radical keen on sweeping 
 changes, or anxious to untie another knot he had 
 found in his labyrinth of religious confusions. 
 He changed in a trice from grave to gay with a 
 dexterous swiftness which was free of restless- 
 ness or flightiness. He never let himself or his 
 listeners be bored or tired by concentrating atten- 
 tion too long on one subject. As a talker by 
 the winter fireside in these days, we gave him 
 the crown for being the king of speakers. Before 
 he had learned the art of writing he had acquired 
 the power of speech, and a way of expressing him- 
 
256 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 self which charmed his hearers. He believed that 
 his tongue had been given him to say pleasant 
 things to his fellow-beings. His *' spice of wit " 
 was Irish in its. promptness and pleasantness. 
 He had none of the exaggeration of American 
 humour, and he winced under the slow felling, 
 humiliating style that Scotch humour excels in. 
 " I love fighting," he said, " but bitterly dislike 
 people to be angry with me — the uncomfortable 
 effect of fighting. I am made up of contradic- 
 tory elements, and have a clearing-house inside 
 of me where I dishonour cheques of bitterness." 
 When he fought with that weapon, his tongue, he 
 fought a fair fight from pure love of battle, never 
 harbouring ill-will, though feeling wounds more 
 acutely than most from his super-sensitiveness. 
 His politeness to people he was not in accord 
 with brought him up before the Bar of the 
 "Little Committee" on the charge of being a 
 humbug. He never acquired the brusque, honest 
 rudeness of the true-born Scot, either in manner 
 or appearance. Dull people were the only human 
 beings he belaboured with scorn. Considering 
 that then he was in the full bloom of the critical 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 257 
 
 self-satisfaction of youth, this showed his just 
 mind and kindliness of heart. Bad-tempered or 
 vicious people he could respect; but folk with 
 torpid minds he fell foul of, and after loading 
 them with comical sarcasms, reproach, and com- 
 miseration, he would next begin to wonder how 
 it would feel to be inside their dense minds. 
 He was, with that inquisitiveness of his, always 
 longing to wear other people's shoes, to see 
 where they pinched — king's shoes or beggar's 
 " bauchles " he would have tried — and his imagin- 
 ings of comforts to be derived from, or pains 
 suffered in, the wearing of them, he would give 
 us as he stood on the hearth smoking endless 
 cigarettes. 
 
 He was tireless in his search for new sensa- 
 tions and new experiences. No one ever had 
 such an insatiable curiosity. He did not take 
 Thoreau's advice: "Do not seek so anxiously to 
 be developed, to subject yourself to many in- 
 fluences, to be played on ; it is all dissipation." 
 He revelled in being so played upon — a new tune 
 every day he would have liked. Rathillet's cloak 
 about his mouth excited his boyish interest in 
 
 17 
 
258 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 that first visit of his to Fife, where he found that 
 "history broods over that part of the kingdom 
 like the easterly haar." The Princes Street Gar- 
 dens attracted him, not only for seclusion, but be- 
 cause there he always hoped to find on the green 
 slope a subterranean passage which in olden days 
 had led from the houses on the Castle Hill to 
 the Nor' Loch. 
 
 In his very early days Louis told us he had 
 longed for a brother, so that he might call him 
 Raca, and see what would happen. We assured 
 him if he had come over to our nursery he would 
 have experienced prompt punishment from the 
 powers on high ; for, on the use of any unparlia- 
 mentary language, our nurse, a disciplinarian, 
 would have applied a spoonful of mustard to the 
 erring tongue. Louis asserted that though this 
 treatment had given us a horror of "Colman," 
 it did not seem to have eradicated opprobrious 
 epithets from our vocabulary. In fact, he con- 
 sulted Jarvis as to our upbringing, for he was 
 puzzled to find that we younger members of a 
 long family had eluded the Shorter Catechism, 
 and only knew a few psalms and paraphrases in 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 259 
 
 metre. He persisted that he once heard us 
 wrangling as to whether there were eleven or 
 twelve commandments. We pretended to be 
 offended by this statement, and he was profuse 
 in his apologies, but he refused to be convinced, 
 and baptized us the Scottish Heathen. 
 
 He told us he had been taught from his infancy, 
 along with the Shorter Catechism, that the devil, 
 for obvious reasons, always favoured the first ven- 
 tures of a gambler. He, with a firm belief in 
 this, and anxious to cheat Satan, when ordered 
 South, put five pounds on the gaming table, hug- 
 ging himself with the knowledge that this was 
 to be his last as well as his first venture. He 
 was full of visions how he would spend the gold 
 thus won from the devil, so he put his money 
 down with smiling confidence — and lost. He was 
 utterly flabbergasted. He felt, he said, as if a 
 prop of his belief had been shattered, but he 
 added that Satan made a mistake if he thought 
 he would ever get him to try his luck again. 
 
 When his ventures and theories failed, naturally 
 he was crestfallen, but with his determination to 
 be cheerful, and his elastic nature, he brightened 
 
2 6o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 up, and sought for some other ground to explore. 
 His conversation wandered through many curious 
 by-paths, and was overflowing with strangely 
 odd conjectures. At one time he was bent on 
 founding a pawning society. Every one was to 
 pawn under the title of Arthur Libble the world 
 over. Some future investigator of musty records 
 was to be astounded that Arthur Libble had been 
 constantly raising money on all manner of things 
 in every quarter of the globe. Lives of Arthur 
 Libble were to be written in coming centuries, 
 and many conjectures made as to the manner of 
 man he was. Louis relished, as he said, " to 
 play with possibility, and knock a peg for fancy 
 to hang on," and he saw and planned many pos- 
 sibilities as to Arthur Libble. We said we did 
 not want to pawn anything ; and Louis, who had 
 come in elated, was very depressed because we 
 would not join in this new-fangled fad of his. 
 
 Another evening he fell to conjecturing, if he 
 were suddenly transplanted back to the fourteenth 
 or fifteenth century, what vocation in life would 
 have suited him. His companions said they 
 would have gone, heavily sheathed in armour, as 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 261 
 
 knights or their followers, careering about on 
 cart horses. Though Louis, too, would fain have 
 been one of them, he knew his want of physical 
 strength would have debarred him from that 
 rough-and-ready life. He thought a jester would 
 have suited his capabilities— Wamba, Touchstone, 
 Yorick, and many friends in motley sprang up to 
 bear him company. His face shone, and he per- 
 ambulated up and down the library picturing 
 himself "a fool i' the forest." A man-at-arms 
 shattered his dreams, and brought him to a stand- 
 still on the rug. He held Louis had not brains 
 enough for a jester, but our gay R. L. S. 
 defended his aptitude for the post gallantly. 
 Finally, however, he had to abandon this bright- 
 robed career. The man-at-arms showed our slim 
 friend that although he could certainly talk so 
 as to amuse two or three gathered round a nine- 
 teenth century library fire, he had no voice to 
 sing to the ladies in the bower, no diplomatic 
 tact wherewith to humour his lord, and would 
 have given way to the temptation to harangue 
 guests gathered round the baronial board on some 
 private hobby of his own. He most unwillingly 
 
262 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 relinquished cap and bells, and tried, without suc- 
 cess, many employments. " I believe I would 
 have to have been a turnspit," he cried in despair, 
 but another vowed he was unfit even for that, for 
 he would have scattered gravy as he scattered 
 cigar ash, as he could no more keep his hands 
 from their dumb pantomime than his tongue from 
 its flow of words. Finally, and humbly, he took 
 refuge in the Church, but as he could not even 
 angle for Friday's dinner, he fixed that his 
 Middle Ages vocation would have been clerk 
 to the buttery and cellar. 
 
 After long marvelling at my brother's fondness 
 for birds, and the pleasure he obtained from his 
 small aviary which adjoined the library, Louis 
 thought he, too, would like to taste of the joys of 
 bird-keeping. He dashed in one forenoon to say 
 he had started a cageful of avadavats. For a 
 few days he came regularly to sing their praises. 
 Then he arrived with them, and begged that they 
 might be taken from him, for they had got on 
 his nerves. His bulletins of satisfaction at their 
 presence were all sanguine make-believes. The 
 scraping of their bills, their perpetual feeble chirp, 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 263 
 
 irritated him, and the sight of the line cf them 
 crushed up together for warmth, made him, too, 
 feel chilly. 
 
 Louis wanted to see if he could satisfy the 
 appetite for sugar of a greedy pug we had. The 
 dog had still a capacity for more lumps when the 
 bag of sugar was empty, so Louis said he thought 
 he could not afford to investigate that matter 
 further. Some views on dessert plates instigated 
 him to read Dumas to find out what they por- 
 trayed. He was one of those curious passengers 
 Thoreau speaks of, who looked over the tafferel of 
 his craft during the voyage over the sea of life, 
 and did not journey like a stupid sailor picking 
 oakum. He saw many wonders that other pas- 
 sengers were blind to. In great, as well as in 
 trivial things, Louis Stevenson was full of absorb- 
 ing curiosity. He could understand Shelley when, 
 with Jane Williams, in a cockleshell of a boat, he 
 suggested, " Now, let us together solve the great 
 mystery." 
 
 Louis did not hesitate to get into all sorts and 
 conditions of mischief to " see what it was like." 
 No experience, good or bad, did he hear of, but 
 
264 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 he must try to see it from his point of view. 
 Sidney Colvin, writing of Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 says : " A restless and inquiring conscience kept 
 him inwardly calling in question the grounds of 
 conduct and the accepted codes of society, and he 
 himself says he was of a conversable temper and 
 insatiably curious in the aspects of life, and spent 
 much of his time scraping acquaintance with all 
 classes of men and womenkind." 
 
 His father, in his college days, gave him two 
 shillings and sixpence a week for pocket-money. 
 " A man can't help being sober and moral on 
 that," he said ruefully to a friend, holding out 
 the dole. This friend, meeting him years after by 
 Australasian seas, reminded him of the scene, and 
 Louis laughed merrily. He said he had forgotten 
 it, but the mention of the very street-corner 
 where they had talked, when he thirsted for fore- 
 sights of life, brought it all back to him. Mr. 
 Stevenson was far from being miserly, so no doubt 
 he had excellent reason for his limited allowance 
 to his son. Louis had his comfortable home. 
 Unlike most fathers, Mr. Stevenson urged his son 
 in vain to run up a tailor's bill for suitable clothes. 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 265 
 
 Louis also could get on credit anything within 
 reason at the shops his parents patronized ; but 
 he had proved he could be reckless of money 
 out of curiosity, "just to feel what it was like to 
 be a spendthrift," as readily as he would waste 
 his emotions without sense of proportion. Two 
 friends of his, to curb their extravagance in dress 
 and superfluous knick-knacks, never bought any- 
 thing without notifying the fact to one another. 
 Louis enjoyed the letters which passed between 
 them, demanding liberty to make a purchase. He 
 said he could not join them, as he had no money 
 to spend, and the only shops that tempted him 
 were the booksellers' and jewellers'. He liked 
 precious stones for their sparkle and colour, and 
 wished he could be a Rajah or Indian potentate, 
 and go daily decked with strings of gems. If he 
 had wished to join the Club to which his intimates 
 belonged, Mr. Stevenson would have paid his 
 entrance fee, and provided him with funds to 
 enjoy himself there ; but a Princes Street Club 
 Louis despised. He preferred rather vagabondish 
 haunts of his own in Edinburgh, but the Savile 
 Club in London, of which he was a member, 
 
266 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 he found congenial. His Edinburgh hero, John 
 Nicholson, goes to Colette's, which had nothing 
 much to recommend it, for it had an " unsavoury 
 interior," where John found several members of the 
 Junior Bar, not very sober, sitting round a table 
 at a coarse meal served on a dirty table-cloth. 
 But Colette, being a contraband hotel-keeper, had 
 an attraction. When they had all been marched 
 off to the police office for drinking at this arch 
 shebeener's, they adjourned to one of the crest- 
 fallen company's rooms in Castle Street, " where 
 (for that matter) they might have had quite as 
 good a supper and far better drink than in the 
 dangerous paradise from which they had been 
 routed." Louis took this sketch from his own 
 experience. He used to enjoin all members of 
 the Republic to affirm that he had been in their 
 realm, if they were asked by his parents if Louis 
 had been in talking late the previous evening, 
 and many a time when his latch-key was used 
 at unwarranted hours, he laid the blame on our 
 smoking-room. 
 
 When plans for a tour with his friends were dis- 
 cussed by the winter's fire, and the projects and 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 267 
 
 probable expenses told to Mr. Stevenson, he gave 
 his hearty sanction and liberal funds, so his once 
 upon a time paltry two shillings and sixpence a 
 week must not be harshly judged, or Louis's 
 father thought to have been unduly stingy. 
 
 " It was a comfortable thought to me that I had 
 a father," Louis says in his tale of the College 
 Magazine, when he saw, despite his " lips smiling 
 publicly," that this literary essay was to be a grim 
 fiasco. When failure came, he says, " the necessary 
 interview with my father passed off not amiss." 
 
 Mr. Stevenson loved his only son, and that love 
 caused him much disquietude. Both love and duty 
 made him anxious to guide and keep his boy 
 on the right road. Louis had, however, a mania 
 for by-paths which were not, unfortunately, in 
 the " narrow way " in which his father wished him 
 to walk. Once, when Louis's conduct caused 
 a serious breach, Mr. Stevenson, to recall him 
 from what he deemed " the broad road," stopped 
 the liberal funds he had given to his son. The 
 good man was puzzled that his prodigal was not 
 starved into returning. On the contrary, he con- 
 tinued to fare sumptuously, like the rich man, if 
 
268 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 not spending his substance in riotous living. An 
 audacious friend of Louis's, who knew the whys 
 and wherefores of the father's conduct, told Mr. 
 Stevenson that he knew that if Louis, for want of 
 funds, had to rough it, and fell ill, Mr. Stevenson 
 would reproach himself, so he had advanced him 
 some money, fully assured parental displeasure 
 would melt, and the engineer repay him with 
 interest. It says much for Mr. Stevenson's 
 generosity and fairness of judgment that when he 
 had looked on the matter from his son's point of 
 view, he repaid the money advanced, recalled the 
 unrepentant prodigal, and killed the fatted calf. 
 Anything the least out of the common in fact 
 or fancy attracted Louis's attention, and he was 
 always pursuing some chimera. Two queer quirks 
 of his are noted and known. He once knew a 
 girl born on a twenty-ninth of February, who 
 constantly complained that she had only a birth- 
 day every four years, so Louis gave her as a 
 present the 13th of November, as he said he had 
 no further use for it. He drew up a deed in due 
 legal form, and so endowed her with an annual 
 feast-day. This Adelaide M. Ide, so strangely 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 269 
 
 gifted with a birthday, died lately in Samoa. 
 His step-daughter, also "his friend and scribe," 
 tells how her mother and his cousin, Graham 
 Balfour, were proposing in Samoa to exchange 
 consciences. "Louis was watching the transac- 
 tion with interest, and suggested that the business 
 might be developed, and that a trade journal 
 might be started, where consciences could be 
 advertised for sale or exchange. He himself, he 
 added, might be very glad to avail himself of 
 such facilities, and he wondered what his own 
 conscience would look like in print. ' Oh,' said 
 his cousin, ' let me try.' ' For sale, a conscience, 
 half calf, slightly soiled, gilt-edged (or shall we 
 say uncut?), scarce and curious.'" 
 
 This was the kind of drollery Louis loved of 
 old. Endless were his freakish fancies. After the 
 Inland Voyage had been successfully accomplished, 
 he was full of a project to buy a barge, and 
 saunter through the canals of Europe, Venice 
 being the far-off terminus. A few select share- 
 holders in this scheme were chosen, mostly artists, 
 for the barge plan was projected in the mellow 
 autumnal days at a painters' camp in Fontaine- 
 
270 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 bleau Forest. The company were then all in the 
 bloom of their youth. They were to paint fame- 
 enduring pictures, as they leisurely sailed through 
 life and Europe, and when bowed, grey-bearded, 
 bald-headed men, they were to cease their journey- 
 ings at Venice. There, before St. Mark's, a crowd 
 of clamorously eager picture-dealers and lovers of 
 art were to be waiting to purchase the wonderful 
 work of the wanderers. The scene in the piazza 
 of St. Mark's, on the barge's arrival, the throng of 
 buyers, the hoary-headed artists, tottering under 
 the weight of canvases, was pictured by the his- 
 torian of the voyage. The barge was bought, but 
 bankruptcy stared the shareholders in the face. 
 The patrons of art of that day had no leanings 
 towards the work of the shareholders, and no first 
 breath of success had come yet to the one author 
 among them. The barge was arrested, and with 
 it the canoes which had earned an immortal fame 
 through the Arethusa's pen. They were redeemed 
 by Cigarette from a debtor's prison, the barge 
 sold, and the company wound up. 
 
 At this time he had much of his future work 
 simmering in his brain. One evening he broke 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 271 
 
 out into a species of Jekyl and Hyde plot. 
 Deacon Brodie, the hypocritical villain, who ap- 
 peared as a pillar of the Church, and an able crafts- 
 man before his fellow-townsmen, and was really 
 a gambler and burglar, suggested to Tusitala the 
 two-sidedness of human character, " commingled 
 out of good and evil," the smug front to the world, 
 the villain behind the mask. The story of Burke 
 and Hare's atrocious murders had a fascination for 
 him too, and so had many other tales of old 
 Edinburghers, or tales of Edinburgh itself; for the 
 city is a grey recorder of unforgotten history. 
 " The great North Road," full of highwaymen, was 
 to be the scene and name of a future novel. Louis's 
 route north, if I remember aright, was to be by 
 Berwick and York. The London Road, an outlet 
 from Edinburgh, suggested the commencement of 
 the journey. On a sloppy winter's day Louis 
 stopped to admire the name, " Val de Travers," 
 which was then printed in brass on asphalt pave- 
 ments. It pleased him to see that, though the 
 name was trodden under foot, it shone in letters of 
 gold from out of the mud. He said he would use 
 that undimmable name for a hero of his in some 
 
272 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 story, and imagined him in various situations. He 
 had a long memory for all sorts of things which 
 had arrested his attention, but he must have for- 
 gotten Val de Travers, for he has never raised 
 him from out of the pavement and set him on 
 our shelves. 
 
 " This is a poison bad world for the romancer, 
 this Anglo-Saxon world. I usually get out of it 
 by not having any woman in it at all ; but when 
 I remember I had the Treasure of Franchard 
 refused as unfit for a family magazine, I feel despair 
 weigh upon my wrists," he complained from Vailima. 
 
 Very early in his career, some of his boon com- 
 panions lamented that he was somewhat of a 
 cowardly humbug, for he judiciously kept his Jekyl 
 reputation so much before the innocent public 
 that the Hyde in him, which they knew, was 
 never suspected. They said they could not find a 
 passage in any of his books with even a sugges- 
 tion of Hyde in it. They persisted that he had so 
 cultivated a pure Dr. Jekyl style, that he could 
 not abandon it if he wished, and they, though not 
 all penmen, could write a novel with a more than 
 doubtful plot better than he, the rising author. 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 273 
 
 Their scorn of his Jekyl mask, their boast that 
 they could beat him with his own weapons, put 
 him on his mettle. He avoided their company for 
 some weeks, and laboured sedulously at a novel 
 which would out-Herod Herod. He laid it before 
 them, and they were startled with its strength, its 
 terribleness, its outrageous blackness of human 
 depravity. He was radiant : he had surprised 
 them. The MS. book was kept by one "life-long 
 friend " of his. He had it bound as the History of 
 Peru. The efforts of Louis's companions, which 
 were school-girl reading in comparison, figured on 
 the same shelf as the History of Mexico. They 
 looked so sallow and dull, no one, said their 
 possessor, would take them from their place. 
 Comparatively recently they still existed. Louis, 
 though flattered at the time by their favourable 
 criticisms, bitterly regretted he had entered the 
 list on such a foul tournament, and asked for his 
 work back to commit it to the flames, for fear that 
 it should ever become public* But the " life-long 
 friend " being of a speculative, tormenting turn, 
 held to the manuscript. He said he could black- 
 mail the author whenever he wished by threats of 
 
274 R- L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 publication. Louis, to the end of his days, pled 
 in vain for the reams he had sullied his pen over, 
 and wisely resolved never again to play the 
 part of Hyde with the tell-tale indelibleness of 
 ink. 
 
 Louis had never any inclination for outdoor 
 sports or pastimes. Riding along the hard roads 
 round Edinburgh did not strike his fancy, though 
 in Samoa, Mr. Bazett Haggard says, he was the 
 second best rider on the island, and he enjoyed 
 nothing better than a gallop on his horse. Skating 
 was the one outdoor amusement he enjoyed, though 
 he never became very proficient at it. Like a crab 
 he could move backwards, but a straightforward 
 course on the ice took him a long time to accom- 
 plish. He liked watching others at .their intricate 
 figure-cutting, or skimming along in swallow-like 
 flights. 
 
 The clear exhilarating air and the good spirits 
 of every one contented him. Town ponds he did 
 not care to frequent, but when Duddingston bore 
 he abandoned work, and spent his days there. He 
 watched the curlers, though his interest in the rink 
 was not in the destination of the booming stones, 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 275 
 
 but in the jovial faces of the players, and the broad 
 Scotch terms which seemed part and parcel of the 
 roaring game. One winter of continued frost we 
 went daily out of Edinburgh by train to skate on 
 an unfrequented sheet of ice, and Louis joined us. 
 It was at the village in which my father had been 
 born and reared. His remaining brother used to 
 watch for us as the Edinburgh -train arrived, and 
 Louis, quick to notice and sympathize, observed 
 how the old man's kindly face lit up with pleasure 
 when he spied us. Louis complained he had no 
 distinctive career, not even a surname of his own, 
 at Bathgate; for our Uncle Sandy never could 
 remember his name, and called him " the poor 
 shilpit laddie," and the village schoolboys, who 
 came to slide, pointed him out as the " foreigner " 
 or " yon skinny ane." When he took off his cloak, 
 and began to warm himself by gliding on the 
 black ice, lie looked very slight among the buirdly 
 curlers. 
 
 " Why," said he one day, "does that dear old 
 gentleman, your uncle, think I've the appetite of a 
 prize-fighter, or is he a cannibal ? He piles my 
 plate with corned beef and keeps it piled. All your 
 
276 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 other friends who go in with you to what he calls 
 ' tea,' and which I call a cold banquet, he allows to 
 eat, drink, and be merry in their own way, but he 
 keeps watching and stuffing me. To-day he says 
 he thinks I'm fatter." We explained that our uncle, 
 having befriended our father when he was an im- 
 pecunious student in Edinburgh, had ever a gener- 
 ous solicitude for any he thought struggling to 
 keep themselves at college, and he could not be 
 convinced that " that poor shilpit-like laddie," as he 
 called his nephew's friend, was not an impecunious 
 student of foreign extraction. It was in vain we 
 told him Louis had a doting father and mother 
 alive, and was a born and bred Edinburgher. 
 " They might give him a great-coat," suggested 
 our uncle. " Poor creature ! I don't like to see 
 him with only that old curtain to wrap round 
 him." 
 
 Louis was fond of walking, but golf did not 
 strike him as an attractive addition to that exercise. 
 It appeared to him very poor amusement to inter- 
 rupt meditation or talk to hit a ball, and he was 
 an unsympathetic listener only when his friends 
 began discussing their strokes when their day's 
 
111111 
 
 LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 277 
 
 sport was done. Golf, too, in these Edinburgh 
 days of his, was more confined to Scotland. It 
 was then a Calvinistic sport, stern and hardy. 
 Wind-shaven whins swallowed up balls, and there 
 were no lawn-like inland courses with green velvet 
 turf. If Louis had fancied it at all, he would have 
 liked it when it was played on the sea links, with 
 the tingle of the salt on one's lips, but out of doors 
 his attention was all given to word painting. He 
 had, when a boy, summering at North Berwick, 
 followed Robert Chambers, junior, round the links ; 
 and years after, wishing to help a friend who 
 wanted to contribute to Chambers' Journal, he 
 wrote him the following letter : — 
 
 " Dear Sir, — I do not know if you ever observed 
 me, but I have more than once followed your 
 triumphant progress round a golfing green, and 
 though this would hardly stand for an introduction, 
 I daresay you know me by name. The paper en- 
 closed is by a friend of mine, and it seemed to me 
 very suitable to Chambers' Journal. Will you 
 look at it and let me know ? This is a very incon- 
 gruous letter altogether. The last incongruity is 
 
278 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 that I should put this infinitesimal rag of paper 
 into such a mighty continent as the envelope. 
 " Yours truly, 
 "Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 
 When the daylight visibly increased, after the 
 new year, Louis liked to wander about his native 
 city. The Calton Hill, he held, was a compre- 
 hensive place from which to contemplate it, for 
 then you had Arthur's Seat with its "house of 
 kings " at its feet, and the long ridge of the old 
 town bristling with spires — a romance in stone and 
 lime from the Castle to Holyrood. The beauty of 
 the scene in sunshine or haar pleased him, however 
 much he complained of its scowling weather. On 
 Sunday afternoons we went further afield. Dud- 
 dingston village, lying at the back of the leonine 
 green hill, away from the city's traffic, found special 
 favour in his sight. One day, as he looked down on 
 it from the road by Dunsappie, he expressed a 
 sudden desire to have rooms there, in its peaceful 
 out-of-world quiet, and waken to the song of birds; 
 This poetic sentiment his father nipped in the bud', 
 by telling him he could hearken (season providing) 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 279 
 
 to the first low matin chirp o£ early feathered 
 singers in his own room at Heriot Row, for the 
 gardens there were full of thrushes and blackbirds. 
 Rest and Be Thankful, on Corstorphine Hill, was 
 our usual Sunday walk — that well-fended crook on 
 its wooded slope, where David and Alan parted. 
 
 The Hawes Inn, Queensferry, which figures in 
 the Antiquary, also known as the place where 
 Louis's hero David was " Kidnapped," was" 
 another of Robert Louis Stevenson's favoured 
 resorts. The travellers crossing the Forth Bridge, 
 taking a bird's-eye view of that hostelry, have 
 disturbed the privacy of its hawthorn-hedged 
 garden. Louis liked it for its retiredness and old- 
 world air. He never saw it after the railway 
 had disturbed it by bridging the Forth. The 
 Dean Bridge, across which we invariably went 
 on Sunday, was to Louis an unfailing source of 
 pleasure. Looking over the west side (and he 
 always would pause to look) lay the village the 
 town had passed over, still a village of mills, 
 with the roar of the weir, and the river lapping 
 close up to the main-street doorways. On the 
 east side there was the view of the terraced 
 
280 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 valley on which the fashionable places and 
 crescents of houses had defiantly turned their 
 backs, and, immediately below the bridge, a white 
 mill and a dark mill lade. " The dusty miller 
 comes to his door, looks at the gurgling water, 
 hearkens to the turning wheel, and the birds 
 whistling about the shed, and perhaps whistles an 
 air of his own to enrich the symphony, for all 
 the world as if Edinburgh were still the old 
 Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still 
 the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in 
 the green country," writes Louis, speaking of his 
 favourite " little rural village of Dean," which has 
 not been smothered in the annihilating arms of 
 greedy Edinburgh, but by its lowly site still 
 survives in the heart of its west end. The mill 
 of Greenbank is gone. With the quiet of Hawes 
 Inn, it has fallen before fin de sikle improve- 
 ments. 
 
 Louis was never exiled from his old haunts, 
 however. He had a Peter Ibbetson knack of 
 dreaming true. The fickle South did not obliter- 
 ate from his memory the skinning nor'-easter 
 we ofttimes met on that bridge, blowing direct 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 281 
 
 from the ocean. Catriona lived somewhere near 
 the village of Dean, and David Balfour found his 
 way thither. When he sent David and Alan 
 eastwards from Silvermills, one feels, as one goes 
 with them to the sandy dunes of Gullane, the 
 hale sting of the wind, sees the colouring crudely 
 bright in the caller air, and breathes with them 
 the invigorating atmosphere of that coast. Louis 
 always dreamed true. Sometimes it was of his 
 yachting days on the west coast, of the heat 
 of a Highland day when it is hot, such a heat 
 as his Highland fugitives experienced when they 
 baked "like scones on a girdle," imprisoned on 
 the rock in the glen by the watchful soldiers. 
 " Very odd these identities of sensation and 
 the world of connotations implied," he writes 
 from Vailima, when the rain from the westward 
 bespattering his verandah had sent over him " a 
 wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless 
 emotion" and thoughts of Scotland. He com- 
 plained that though he lived a voluntary exile he 
 had his "head filled with the beastly place all 
 the time." That morning the smell of the peats 
 came back to him, the sentiment of the Highland 
 
282 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 scenery, "the rain on the wet moorland Belike," 
 and he felt "the romance of the past, and that 
 indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's 
 heart." His last two heroes lived in his grey 
 town, or sought shelter near by among his 7 well- 
 loved hills. He recalled these familiar scenes in 
 all their vividness, so that his hope was in a 
 manner realized ; he beheld again in dying those 
 " Hills of Home." Truly he sang — 
 
 "The tropics vanish, meseems that I 
 From Halker side, from topmost Allermuir, 
 Or steep Caerketton dreaming, gaze again." 
 
 With this tenacious imagination of his, this Peter 
 Ibbetson hidden gift which he could exercise at 
 will, he never was exiled ; however far in body 
 he was from the land where his forefathers slept, 
 he aye had a blink of his " ain countrie." " It 
 is a singular thing that I should live here in 
 the South Seas," he says in a letter to Mr. Barrie, 
 a few weeks before his death, " and yet my 
 imagination so continually inhabit the cold, old 
 huddle of grey hills from which we came." 
 
 The glimpses of country and fields seen from 
 the heart of Edinburgh were always noted and 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 283 
 
 appreciated by Louis. The closes, which were 
 like gaps in tall cliffs, were as frames to upright 
 vistas of the sea and the Fife Lomonds. Or 
 escaping down from the Parliament House after 
 breathing " dust and bombazine" for a few hours, 
 and finding it the most arduous form of idleness, 
 Louis, rejoicing in the clear pungent air, would 
 descend from the Mound, stirred with delight at 
 the sight of the Highland mountains, hoary with 
 their first powdering of snow. The sights which 
 gave him a feeling of freedom from town fetters — 
 the smell of the plough in his nostrils, the cry of 
 the moorland birds in winter shelter, the ample 
 leisure at his disposal to grind at his apprentice- 
 ship of letters in the seventies — offered some 
 measure of compensation for a climate which he 
 found so uncongenial, though in the long run it 
 would doubtless have been of more enduring 
 benefit than the deceptive seductiveness of the 
 luscious South. His " first draught of considera- 
 tion " for his literary ability was when he was 
 asked to be one of the four editors of the Edin- 
 burgh University Magazine, of which he tells us 
 fil one of his retrospective papers. There were 
 
284 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 some well-known names among the contributors 
 • which should have helped this venture to live 
 longer. Professor Blackie, Principal Tulloch, Dr. 
 Joseph Bell, that able wielder of pen or lancet, 
 and some other standard names. Its failure 
 sent Louis back, as he says, " from the printed 
 author to the manuscript student," and but for 
 Roads, Ordered South, and some other short 
 pieces, we had to wait a few years till he 
 compiled his Inland Voyage. Treasure Island, 
 written some six years after, was the first ship 
 that brought home any weight of gold to his 
 treasury. He took his journey in the Arethusa 
 in 1876, and wrote of it in the following months. 
 That winter, too, he was planning further 
 vagrant travels — this time to the Cevennes. In 
 1875 his door plate, engraved " R. L. Stevenson, 
 Advocate," was put up in Heriot Row. Neither 
 his legal studies nor walking the boards of the 
 Parliament House, waiting for hire, interfered with 
 his literary work, and the long vacations gave 
 him time for nomadic rambles. He had a deed 
 box in the Parliament House, a gown and a wig. 
 Occasionally he filled the two latter, but gradually 
 
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 285 
 
 they, like the box, remained empty. At first, 
 when all was new, the old-world air of the Law 
 Courts, the quiet seclusion in the library below, 
 the legal feet, the novelty of dressing up in the 
 guise of an advocate, attracted him. Once he 
 was told a clerk was looking for him to give him 
 a brief. He tore off his advocate's robes and 
 fled, and was only lured back, some while after 
 when his friends confessed the brief was a myth. 
 Notwithstanding his bad health, he seemed able 
 to take holidays in a very Crusoe fashion, winter 
 or summer. He enjoyed walking tours, and went 
 through Ayrshire in mid-winter. In these years, 
 despite his complaints, he was really fairly un- 
 fettered. He had time for the liberty he craved 
 for. Knapsack on back he would realize his song, 
 and start off with the — 
 
 "Jolly heaven above and the byway nigh." 
 The Courts rose in March for a month or more, 
 and August and September were holiday times. 
 Louis had no cases to work up, no legal pot- 
 boiling to do in the way of reports, no work as 
 locum tenens to a Sheriff, such as the Junior Bar 
 looked for hungrily. If he had not been forced to 
 
286 R, L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 leave the tale half told, his knowledge of Scots 
 Law would have enabled him to try to con- 
 demn Archie Weir in due legal form, and to see 
 that Lord Hermiston conducted himself on the 
 bench as beseemed a Lord of Session. He 
 studied well as a law student, and had a know- 
 ledge and grasp of dry technicalities which no 
 one credited him with, for no one ever saw him 
 show any interest in legal proceedings. He never 
 pled, and did no more than look into the Parlia- 
 ment House to see a friend or read a book, once 
 his gown was no novelty. 
 
 Lord Braxfield's portrait was not bequeathed 
 in Louis's day to the hall of the Courts of Justice 
 where now it rests, but Louis studied it when it 
 was in the Raeburn Exhibition. His freshness 
 of remembrance, his knack of making people see 
 from his point of vision, stood him in good stead 
 when he made Braxfield into Hermiston. The 
 correct legal knowledge he somehow imbibed 
 during his fitful appearances in wig and gown 
 shows he must have given some attention to it, 
 and that knowledge of his recognised profession 
 is reflected in every line of Weir of Hermiston. 
 
Travel Songs 
 
"Give to me the life I love, 
 Let the lave go by me ; 
 Give me the jolly heaven above, 
 
 And the byway nigh me. 
 Let the blow fall soon or late, 
 
 Let what will be o'er me, 
 
 Give the face of earth around 
 
 And the road before me." 
 
 —Songs of Travel. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Travel Songs 
 
 T N one of his essays on a walking tour in 
 ■*■ Ayrshire, Louis speaks of Maybole and the 
 ballad of 'Johnne Faa," the king of Scottish 
 Gipsies and Earl of Little Egypt, by a charter 
 from James V. The Lady of Cassilis, in her high 
 turret, heard the Eastern wanderers sing, and their 
 music arousing old memories and the wild blood 
 in her, she left her husband's castle to follow 
 them. "Even," says Louis, "if the tale be not 
 true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, 
 it is true in the essence of all men and women ; 
 for all of us, sometime or other, hear the gipsies 
 singing, over all of us is the glamour cast. Some 
 resist and sit resolutely by the fire. Most go, and 
 are brought back again like Lady Cassilis. A 
 few of the tribe of Waring go and are seen no 
 * 8 9 19 
 
zgo R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 more ; only now and again, at spring-time, when 
 the gipsies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, 
 we can catch their voices in the glee." Louis's 
 hearing was alert. The Romany music sounded 
 in his ears, and he cast off the strait jacket 
 of convention, arose from the feather bed of 
 civilization, and set off when the first breath of 
 spring reached the North. His cousin, R. A. 
 M. Stevenson, was an artist, and his comrade 
 Cigarette had a brother who lived part of the 
 year at Fontainebleau studying the same profession. 
 The two Edinburgh advocates, glad to be rid of 
 their little-worn gowns and wigs, joined their 
 kinsmen in the refreshing greenery of the forest 
 at some painters' camp which Louis has so well 
 described in his papers on Fontainebleau. " Our 
 society," he says, "was full of high spirits, of 
 laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few 
 elder men who joined us were still young at heart, 
 and took the key from their companions. It was 
 a good place and a good life for any naturally- 
 minded youth ; better yet for the student of 
 painting, and perhaps, best of all, for the student 
 of letters." 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 291 
 
 The attraction to the artists at Barbizon, when 
 they pitched their camp at Siron's, was Millet. 
 The great man had just died, Louis says, when 
 first he went there. He was at Barbizon before 
 Millet's death, but perhaps not as a resident for any 
 length of time. Mr. Will Low, the American 
 artist, speaking of his student days in Paris, says : 
 " In the summer, 1874, the two Stevensons, as they 
 were known, the cousins Robert Louis and Robert 
 Alan Mowbray Stevenson (the author of the recent 
 Life of Velasquez, and the well-known writer on 
 art), were in Barbizon. Millet was not much 
 more than a name to my friends that day when 
 we talked over our coffee in the garden at 
 , Siron's Inn. They had seen little or none of 
 his work. I ventured across the road, knocked 
 at the little green door, and asked permission 
 to bring my friends, which was accorded." The 
 Stevensons had been insisting that all the great 
 artists were passed away. Mr. Low held that 
 giants still walked the earth. He clinched his 
 argument by taking them to Millet's. " In half 
 an hour," he says, " I was witness of an object- 
 lesson, of which the teacher was serenely un- 
 
292 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 conscious. Of my complete triumph when we 
 left there was no doubt, though one of my 
 friends rather begged the question by insisting 
 I had taken an unfair advantage, and that, as 
 he expressed it, 'it was not in the game, in an 
 ordinary discussion between gentlemen, concern- 
 ing minor poets, to drag Shakespeare in, in that 
 way.' " 
 
 At Fontainebleau Louis roved at will, or loafed 
 in the sunshine, read and wrote little and 
 talked much of an evening, for he had able 
 antagonists to grapple with in argument. Mr. 
 Low says : " If Louis Stevenson was the most 
 wonderful talker in the world, as he certainly 
 was, then certainly 'Bob' Stevenson was second 
 to him." But many who knew both these gipsy- 
 looking Stevenson cousins in these days, gave 
 Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson the palm for 
 being more original and spontaneous, and not 
 so persistent in his search after startling themes, 
 but lighting on them unawares. Mr. Low goes 
 on to say that if Robert Louis had died then, 
 or never accomplished anything in his life, he 
 would have regarded him as a great and won- 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 293 
 
 derful personage with the same feeling as he 
 has for him to-day. Mr. Low asserts to an 
 editor of an American magazine that "young 
 Stevenson exercised over himself, and all the 
 others of their circle, the strangest kind of mag- 
 netic power." They all felt, as he did, that they 
 were in the presence of an intellect far beyond 
 them. There was something akin to worship 
 in the feeling entertained by them for Stevenson, 
 and yet Low admits that he and Louis were 
 always quarrelling on all possible subjects ; " they 
 loved each other, yet they argued and fought 
 continually." Mr. Low had more discernment 
 than most, for, among the men who now sit in 
 Weir of Hermiston's place on the bench, or plead 
 before the judges of to-day, and who knew Louis 
 in these his Edinburgh days, I have heard 
 many candidly own they neither particularly liked 
 Louis, nor ever dreamed that he would rise to 
 any eminence. He hid his lights a good deal 
 under a bushel ; frank as he appeared in his talk, 
 there was a vein of hidden secretiveness, half 
 bashful, about him, though he was not troubled 
 with national shyness. In his legal days he 
 
294 R- L- STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 seldom mentioned his patient toiling for mastery 
 over his chosen craft. He fostered the idea that 
 he was a consummate idler, light-hearted and 
 thoughtless, sadly wanting in stability, with no 
 object in life but to "gang his ain gait," and 
 his ways were out of the common ken. Some 
 of his fellow-artists, too, at Barbizon do not recall 
 any special admiration for Robert Louis Stevenson 
 then; for, like his shrewd Edinburgh confreres, 
 men of culture and discernment, they did not 
 bestow much notice on him. His ability to 
 weld his ideas into specific language made him 
 a peerless speaker, and of an evening his thoughts, 
 translated into decorative words, entertained them 
 when they listened. They were all young, self- 
 absorbed, and an Artist of Letters was not held 
 of much account among those whose thoughts 
 were given to the palette and brush. Louis's 
 mannerisms and oddities in dress were quite 
 commonplace in a colony of unconventional 
 beings, and there also, as in Edinburgh, he was 
 not a general favourite. Even the friends of hfe 
 youth, who knew him well, liked him for his 
 lovable, genial gaiety, and were attracted to him 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 295 
 
 by his eager enthusiasm more than by any fore- 
 warning that their comrade was likely to be 
 distinguished. They looked on him with affection, 
 such as they might concede to a child, half in pity 
 for the irresponsible evanescence of its spirits, 
 yet liking its merry carelessness. Sidney Colvin, 
 speaking of Louis when they first met, says : 
 " He was at that time a lad of twenty-two, 
 with his powers not yet set, nor his way of 
 life determined. But to know him was to recog- 
 nise at once that here was a young genius of 
 whom great things might be expected. A slender, 
 boyish presence, with a graceful, somewhat fan- 
 tastic bearing, and a singular power and attraction 
 in the eyes and smile, were the signs that 
 first impressed you ; and the impression was 
 quickly confirmed and deepened by the charm 
 of his talk, which was irresistibly sympathetic 
 and inspiring, and not less full of matter than 
 of mirth." 
 
 So it seems some instinctively foresaw, and 
 some, who were by no means dull of perception, 
 were blind to his future and were not captivated 
 by him in the present. Let it be remembered 
 
296 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 that in Edinburgh Louis Stevenson, during his 
 quarter of a century or more of residence there, 
 was little known. He kept aloof from people and 
 pleasures in his own circle, forming an enthusiastic 
 admiration and worship for a few. " Yon daft 
 laddie Stevenson," a janitor at the Parliament 
 House spoke of him as, and many who knew him 
 by sight, in "his own romantic town," as 
 Thomas Stevenson's son, thought it an apt de- 
 scription of the youth who ran counter to all 
 accepted formulas and customs, and prided him- 
 self on being a bit of a Pariah in the stately 
 city of his birth. '-* 
 
 Louis was always more liked by his seniors. 
 Those of his own age, or younger, were not 
 tolerant of fondness for talking. His charming 
 fluency of speech prejudiced many against him, 
 for in company in these days he strained to 
 attract attention by his power of eloquence, and 
 only a few knew how excellent and sympathetic 
 a listener he could be. He attitudinized in 
 his twenties as a sparkling, flighty speaker, 
 and those of his own years had no patience 
 with his sudden raptures, his almost hysterical 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 297 
 
 sensitiveness over a sad story or a too realistic 
 drama. In the artists' camps, however, they 
 understood his changeable moods, his ecstasies, 
 his ebullitions, and if a phonograph had been 
 in Siron's, at Barbizon, or Chevillon's, at Gretz, 
 when he, invigorated by the out-door life in the 
 spacious woodlands, talked till morning,, that 
 phonograph would have given us nr:cn of his 
 strange surmises racily worded. In his Vailima 
 Letters there is an unpeptonised strength of 
 expression which recalls to those who knew him 
 his every-day style of speech. 
 
 If a phonograph could have recalled his voice, 
 the familiar accent of his country and his mind, 
 untoned into the smooth cadence of words he 
 put before us in print, a cinematograph would 
 have been the only means to recall his appearance. 
 He was all life and movement, and his expression 
 ever changed as he spoke. His bright but wan 
 oval face lit up then, the wine of youth (for he 
 never would have been old if he had lived his 
 allotted threescore and ten) mounted to his 
 thin cheeks, and the glory of soul radiated from 
 his beaming black eyes. Then the mercurial 
 
298 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 movements of his hands were part of his speech ; 
 they were emphasis, interrogation marks, italics 
 to his phrases. It is singular that, living, as he 
 did, for many a week together in spring and 
 autumn among artists, none ever sketched him, 
 though they were on the constant outlook for 
 striking subjects for their brush. Notwithstanding 
 Mr. Low's eulogy, and his belief that his fellows 
 regarded Robert Louis Stevenson "with some- 
 thing akin to worship," none of them sought to 
 immortalize him on what each hoped were their 
 immortal canvases. I have heard many who were 
 of that jovial crew there, say that neither Louis 
 Stevenson's unique face nor his art of talking 
 impressed them much. They noted his feebleness 
 of frame, and liked his courageous gaiety in the 
 face of physical weakness. " I wonder,'' he asks, 
 " if ever any one had more energy upon so little 
 strength ? " One portrait was done of him at 
 Fontainebleau, not on canvas, but on the white 
 walls of Chevillon's salon at Gretz. It was a 
 caricature, but at the same time an unmistakable 
 likeness. Louis was portrayed shivering on the 
 brink of the river, preparing to dive, but shrinking 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 299 
 
 from the leap, his shoulders shrugged, and his 
 hands drooping limply from the wrists in pro- 
 testing supplication. The figure was outlined 
 in black. It accentuated his deplorable leanness, 
 added a few inches to the length of his hair, 
 and made it stray in unkempt locks over his 
 brow. 
 
 Louis in these days was no sketcher. The 
 Studio gave in the winter number 1896-97, some 
 pictures of his, clever outlines, some done, it is 
 said, in Davos. Whether he had cultivated an 
 ability to wield his pencil later, as he learned 
 the flageolet, or whether his hostages to fortune 
 helped him, I know not. But at Barbizon the 
 artists' community offered the two aliens in their 
 camp, the Cigarette and the Arethusa, a prize 
 for the best landscape. It had been discovered 
 that Cigarette could draw the old-fashioned 
 valentine — heart pierced by Cupid's dart — but 
 the Arethusa's anatomy was undoubtedly faulty 
 and the Blind Boy's arrow in his hands under- 
 went serpentine contortions. Still Arethusa said 
 he could draw, at any rate better than the Cigarette, 
 and so the contest was arranged. The luxuriant 
 
300 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 tangle of the forest, the glades, or some wood- 
 land veteran standing out alone in leafy promin- 
 ence, the competitors refused to attempt. Finally, 
 a wall was fixed on as their motif. Most of 
 the onlookers backed the Arethusa; the fervour 
 with which he entered into criticism of his 
 friends' pictures, his very looks which made him 
 appear as one of themselves, inclined them to 
 believe he would win. He settled down to his 
 task, smiling and confident, while Cigarette, his 
 pipe well between his teeth, sat silent, and 
 steadily worked. His rival chattered as he glanced 
 at the motif, and had hardly a hand left to 
 ■draw with as he flourished his pencil like a 
 conductor's wand, and used the other hand as 
 a species of telescope to focus with, as he had 
 seen others do. The result was that Louis lost. 
 His wall was quite incomprehensible, while my 
 brother had got his clearly built and the stones 
 put in, in a heavy-handed, firm manner, properly 
 shaded too. This primitive prize study was 
 called from its stolidity the Scotch Dyke. 
 Stevenson was disappointed, but owned he was 
 honestly beaten. The artists encouraged these 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 301 
 
 two novices at their trade to continue their 
 studies, but Robert Louis Stevenson's work re- 
 mained ludicrously hopeless, and he never could 
 be taught to outline his wounded heart and its 
 damaging dart aright. Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, in 
 The Edinburgh Academy Chronicle of March, 1895, 
 speaking of a visit to Robert Louis Stevenson 
 at Skerry vore in 1885 and subsequent years, 
 says : " He was then very ill, but his beautiful 
 gaiety never failed him, and his own sufferings 
 seemed but to make him the more tender to his 
 friends. He invented many pastimes for himself 
 and them. At one time he modelled little clay 
 figures, beginning them in one intention, and 
 then humorously changing it to suit their changing 
 appearance. He could not draw a stroke'' 
 
 Louis, if his fingers refused to sketch, could 
 always portray in words, and he had a special 
 gift in fixing on appropriate names. Among 
 them in the forest came one called Violet le Due. 
 This man pricked up his ears when he heard the 
 English colony speak his name at table. Louis 
 saw this, so he called a meeting of his country- 
 men and those who spoke the mother tongue, 
 
, 3 o2 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 explained how Violet le Due hearkened sus- 
 piciously to the sound of his name, but how 
 without a breach of good manners they could 
 continue to remark on his work if they would 
 but adopt his suggestion. Violet le Due would 
 have, when mentioned among the English-speak- 
 ing community, to discard his ducal coronet, and 
 be known in future as Primrose the Earl, by 
 -which equally spring-like title they discussed 
 him freely, while he within earshot remained 
 happily unconscious. 
 
 Many of the artists were musical, but Louis 
 Stevenson took no part in their impromptu 
 concerts. He liked their songs and rattling re- 
 frains, but he was no singer, nor had he much 
 of an ear for music. He would attempt to pick 
 out a tune with one finger on the piano. He 
 says he had a rudimentary acquaintance with 
 " Auld Lang Syne " and the " Wearing of the 
 Green." He makes David and his forebear at 
 Pilrig have a musical ear, for the Laird received 
 David Balfour " in the midst of learned works 
 and musical instruments, for he was not only a 
 deep philosopher, but much of a musician." 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 303 
 
 Flageolet-playing, a later accomplishment, or one 
 hidden like his sketching, was one of his impulsive 
 whims, — an experiment undertaken to see if he 
 liked making music, as he had once before experi- 
 mented to see if he could like the cageful of 
 unrestful avadavats. 
 
 A fancy for gardening, that "purest of human 
 pleasures," came on him in his later years, and 
 he found it, as Bacon said, "the greatest refresh- 
 ment to the spirit of man." In the well-planted 
 garden at Swanston he took no practical interest 
 in the growth of the flowers till, in course of the 
 season, their fully developed beauty burst on him, 
 and they sweetened the air with their perfume. 
 But at Vailima the gardening fever came on him 
 strongly. In a letter to Dr. Bakewell he said : 
 " However, I am off work this month, and occupy 
 myself in weeding cacao, papa chases, and the 
 like. My long, silent contests in the forest have 
 had a strange effect on me." Much of his garden- 
 ing struggles are recorded in Vailima Letters. He 
 had the tropical rapidity of vegetation to contend 
 with, and a primeval growth of weeds to subdue. 
 He liked difficulties, for in spite of his physical 
 
3 o4 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 disabilities he had a stubborn doggedness about 
 him. A long-cared-for garden never tempted him 
 to adopt Robert Young's trade, but the untutored 
 wealth of his own domain incited him to action, 
 and, like the settlers, he set to work on the hard 
 task to tame the wilderness. 
 
 At Fontainebleau he entered sympathetically 
 into the artists' struggles, and he envied them 
 their complacent contentment, whether their day's 
 work had been successful or not, comparing it 
 with the reproaches he inflicted on himself if 
 after labouring with his pen, his pages were not 
 up to his ideal. His comrades, especially the 
 foreigners, at Siron's or Chevillon's, were suavely 
 polite, and Louis liked polish, French or other- 
 wise. He found, however, that when a wind of 
 adversity blew, his own " brither Scots " were, 
 like the Douglases, "tender and true." He was 
 a strange mixture of nervous, womanish fears, 
 along with that braveness which enabled him to 
 face ill-health smilingly and reap a harvest of 
 happiness in the Land of Counterpane, a task 
 which would have baffled most strong men. In 
 his forest wanderings he had encountered midges, 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 305 
 
 which distracted him sadly when he was enjoy- 
 ing visions, searching new ways to enter that 
 House Beautiful of his dreams. The forest also 
 hid other enemies in ambush — the tics which 
 brush off the ferns on to passers-by. He ac- 
 quired one of these, and in an anxious horror 
 rushed into the salon crying that a wart had 
 appeared on his arm which, like the "Fat Boy" 
 in Pickwick, was " visibly swelling." They told 
 him laughingly it was a blood-sucking forest in- 
 habitant, at which the highly strung Louis be- 
 came panic-stricken. Cummy often had seen these 
 exaggerated terrors take possession of the small 
 boy she had nursed, but even the profusely com- 
 miserating foreign artists present laughed as they 
 saw their gay Stevenson in tears. They thought 
 he was so affected for their amusement, but this 
 frenzy was no Stevensonian trick to attract atten- 
 tion. The first to realize that Louis's uncontrolled 
 fear was not mockery was his trusty friend the 
 Cigarette. He tried to reassure the distraught 
 Arethusa by telling him that a like fate befel 
 many, that Taureau, the bull-dog, survived, though 
 daily he came in with a crop of vampirish tics 
 
 20 
 
306 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 on him, which made his master and Coco, the 
 monkey, pay him such close attention. Finally, 
 he extracted the foreign body from the weeping 
 Arethusa, who was duly grateful. But it was a 
 subject the blithe R. L. S. would not take 
 a comic view of, for when the artists jested on it 
 later he paled at the mention of the scene. 
 
 Taureau, the bull-dog, recalls how Robert Louis's 
 beggarly clothes exceeded the usual degree of 
 artistic nondescriptness. The dog was ill, and heat 
 and care were the prescription. Madame Chevillon 
 was attentive to her four-legged boarder. She 
 saw him shiver, and the kindly Frenchwoman 
 looked for something to wrap him in. She took 
 what came nearest her hand, which happened to 
 be Louis's well-known velveteen jacket. It was a 
 warm August day, and he enjoyed the freedom 
 of sitting without his coat, and had flung his 
 outer garment on to the bench. When evening 
 came he hunted for his old, derided friend in 
 every conceivable place. Madame had not seen 
 it. She was tearful and dispirited over the dog. 
 Louis continued his search till the waning day 
 brought the artists back from their work, and 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 307 
 
 Taureau's master went straight to visit his sick 
 dog. The velveteen was next the patient's skin, 
 the ragged lining outside. He flung the unsightly 
 wrap away from his favourite, and Louis spied 
 his jacket on the floor. He was indignant at 
 the use it had been put to, but Madame and 
 Taureau's master held it was an insult that so 
 valuable a dog had been equipped in such rags. 
 When he first knew Fontainebleau, Barbizon 
 was the favoured artists' haunt, but its selectness 
 and freedom having been spoilt by invaders, two 
 men set out to look for other quarters, and came 
 back reporting well of Gretz. There the river 
 and the boats were specially novel attractions, — 
 " something to do," they said, " when feeling averse 
 to work." "The consistent idler," as Louis called 
 himself, to disguise the fact that he was the 
 hardest worker among them, " had no craving, 
 like his brethren, after that something to do." 
 All he wanted was to walk, to dream, to see, 
 and to store his mind with what he saw. Speak- 
 ing of the bathers and canoes at Gretz, he says 
 they told a tale " of a society that has an eye 
 to pleasure. Perhaps for that very reason I can 
 
308 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories 
 of exhilaration as among the solemn groves and 
 uneventful hours of Barbizon. This 'something 
 to do' is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out 
 of it ; you wreak your high spirits on some cut- 
 and-dry employment and behold them gone." 
 
 Gretz unawares became an important place to 
 Louis. It was, so to speak, a cross-road on his 
 way of life, and from there he took a route which 
 led him away from the home and his friends " in 
 the venerable city " which, he writes from Samoa, 
 "I must always think of as my home." Louis 
 was seldom in Edinburgh in summer. Swanston 
 was too attractive to him. In summer his friends' 
 canoes were launched on "the Forth's ample 
 waters set with sacred isles," and after a day's 
 sailing on the Firth they came home browned 
 with the sea air. Gretz started Stevenson off on 
 new journeyings. It suggested An Inland Voyage. 
 In Gretz, too, one autumn, he had an experience 
 which he never alluded to in his constant auto- 
 biographic peeps which are scattered through 
 his pages. To the village on the outskirts of 
 the forest came a travelling player and his wife, 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 309 
 
 half conjurors and half actors, who gave per- 
 formances in Chevillon's and the neighbourhood. 
 Louis Stevenson took one of his enthusiastic fits 
 over this man, who told him tales, and assured 
 his listener he was an Austrian count in disguise, 
 while his wife was a Bulgarian. Louis came 
 into the salon full of this romantic tale, and was 
 offended at it being suggested that the conjuror 
 was so well disguised no one could possibly have 
 guessed his identity. He became enamoured of 
 these charlatans, and took as a personal insult 
 the ready laugh of the salon when a joker 
 named the count and his wife the " Bulgarian 
 Atrocities." Among the once-united coterie at 
 Gretz there had by then been sown some dissen- 
 sion, so life did not run on such easy lines 
 as formerly. Louis hotly upheld the authenticity 
 of the Austrian count's pedigree. He attended 
 all his performances, applauding loudly, walked, 
 talked, and sat in Chevillon's kitchen hobnobbing 
 with the ably disguised conjuror. There were 
 people coming to Gretz whom Louis wished to 
 avoid, so he suddenly announced his decision to 
 accept an offer from the Bulgarian Atrocities, and 
 
3io R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 go a-touring with them. The gipsy glamour of 
 a roving life was still unsatisfied by his other 
 autumn travels. Louis Stevenson, to use a Scotch 
 phrase, "kept a quiet sough" on his experiences 
 as a merryandrew. He was supposed by his 
 people to be among his artist friends, but when 
 he returned to Chevillon's he was, for him, mar- 
 vellously reticent on his adventures. All he ad- 
 mitted was that he played before French yokel 
 audiences a part which was not of a high-class 
 order — the part of a stupid Englishman whose 
 mistakes in a foreign tongue were such as to 
 appeal to the gallery. Only in the Inland Voyage 
 did Louis give a hint of his knowledge of people 
 like his disguised count. "I am pretty well ac- 
 quainted with the ways of French strollers, more 
 or less artistic," he says ; and adds, " I have found 
 J them singularly pleasant" but, unlike his usual 
 generosity in always sharing his pleasures with 
 the public, on this occasion he kept them to 
 himself. 
 
 For a delicate person Robert Louis took 
 liberties with his constitution which were suicidal. 
 Crossing the Atlantic and then the Plains as 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 311 
 
 an emigrant brought him very near the grave, 
 in fact he never recovered from the effects of 
 these voyages ; but before these wretched experi- 
 ences he had faced winter and rough weather on 
 walking tours, and Modestine and he had not 
 good camping-out weather in the Cevennes. This 
 touring with mountebanks in France must have 
 been rash for one so sickly as he, with no British 
 grey-suited comrade in his wake with pockets 
 adequately lined, to take him out of the clutches 
 of gendarmes and see that he had decent meals 
 and accommodation. If the scheme of the barge 
 had not failed for want of funds, it would have 
 been an ideal life for the migratory author. 
 While thus yachting on land, as it were, there 
 would always have been calm waters to traverse, 
 no monotony as on the houseless ocean, many 
 glimpses of happy home life as he glided past : 
 such anonymous blessings as he describes as the 
 Arethusa, " when ideas came and went like motes 
 in a sunbeam, when trees and church spires along 
 the banks surged up from time to time in my 
 notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloud- 
 land. Indeed, it lies so far from beaten paths 
 
312 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 of language that I despair of getting the reader / 
 
 into the smiling, complaisant idiotcy of my con- 
 dition. 
 
 The thirst to travel simply for the sake of 
 moving, which Stevenson says assailed, him, would 
 have been assuaged. In a barge Louis could have 
 had his home comforts, his books, his desk, about 
 him, and thus journeyed with what Bailie Nicol 
 Jarvie would have classed " as a' the comforts o' 
 the Saut Market," through the opulent lands 
 bordering whatever watery road he chose. If he 
 had felt inclined to tarry in any tempting spot, 
 a site for his movable house was always obtainable 
 by the canal bank. A mad Highland woman 
 whom Louis met on one of his knapsack wander- 
 ings, about 1870, told him his fortune. "All I 
 could gather," he says, *' may be thus summed up 
 shortly : that I was to visit America, that I was 
 to be very happy, and that I was to be much 
 upon the sea — predictions which, in consideration of 
 an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable 
 with one another." " The pythoness was right," he 
 adds in 1887. " I have been happy. I did go 
 to America (am going again, unless — ), and I 
 
 / 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 313 
 
 have been twice, and once upon the deep." A 
 barge life would have saved the search for health 
 so far off on the Pacific where, instead of giving 
 way to the lotus-eating indolence of the enervating 
 climate, he worked harder than ever he did in the 
 bracing North. Prophetically, at the end of An 
 Inland Voyage, he says : " Now we were to return 
 like the voyager in the play and see what re- 
 arrangements fortune had perfected the while in 
 our surroundings* what surprises stood ready-made 
 for us at home, and whither and how far the world 
 had voyaged in our absence. You may paddle 
 all day long ; but it is when you come back at 
 nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that 
 you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the 
 stove : and the most beautiful adventures are not 
 those we go to seek." 
 
 From this journey, with those "fleet and footless 
 beasts of burthen," the canoeists returned to Gretz, 
 and there by the stove sat Love awaiting Robert 
 Louis Stevenson. In The Wrecker there is an 
 American, Loudon Dodd, whose father, seeing an 
 opening for a man who could turn out statues 
 to embellish Muskegon State public hall, orders 
 
314 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 his son to learn sculpture. " I took up the statuary 
 contract on our new capitol ; I took it up first 
 as a deal ; and then it occurred to me it would 
 be better to keep it in the family. There is con- 
 siderable money in the thing, and it's patriotic," 
 he explained to Loudon, and to Paris Loudon 
 went. The real Loudon, one Mr. " Pardesous," was 
 in truth despatched to " learn to sculp " for a hall 
 in some State which awaited his works of art. 
 One small statue of Freedom holding a banner 
 was all he accomplished after his studies. He 
 knew the artists and their haunt at Gretz, and 
 in 1876 brought down there some ladies of his 
 own nation, who were also in Paris studying art. 
 Pardesous was recommended by habitues to take 
 his compatriots to another hotel at Gretz. But to 
 Chevillon's there came Mrs. Osbourne, her daughter 
 Belle, and her son Sam, a lanky little boy, for ever 
 growing out of his clothes. Sam was commonly 
 known at Gretz as " Petit feesh," from the way he 
 persistently spent his time angling for the inhabi- 
 tants of the river ; and when asked by the Gretz 
 boys what he was catching, replied, " Petit feesh." 
 These " petit feesh" (Anglice, minnows) he spent 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 315 
 
 much time over, cooking them by the stove, and 
 constantly demanding a hairpin from his sister 
 Belle as a spit. Mrs. Osbourne's cloudy hair was 
 upheld by a piece of scarlet -window-cord which 
 contrasted well with its darkness. The Osbournes 
 had been in Paris a year or two. Both mother 
 and daughter were art students. Another son of 
 Mrs. Osbourne's — "Herbie" I think his name was — 
 had died in Paris, and his death had been a great 
 grief to her. The artist colony were not best 
 pleased by an American petticoat invasion. As 
 Stevenson says : " Curious and not always edifying 
 are the shifts that the French student uses to 
 defend his lair ; like the cuttlefish, he must some- 
 times blacken the waters of his chosen pool ; but 
 at such a time and for so practical a purpose 
 Mrs. Grundy must allow him license." 
 
 However, the Osbournes had worked at Julien's 
 studio with many who were at Chevillon's, and 
 they were predisposed in their favour. Miss 
 Osbourne had once gone to a Quartier Latin fancy 
 ball, given by an American, dressed as a nugget 
 of gold. The host at this dance was one who 
 appears in The Wrecker as Romney. He was 
 
316 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 pathetically impecunious, older than most of his 
 fellows. " I'm poor, I'm old, I'm bald ! " he ex- 
 claimed one day in despair. He lived on fare as 
 spare as many a starving Scotch student, substitut- 
 ing potatoes for meal. Taureau's master gave him 
 the sabots the Luxembourg authorities complained 
 of as too noisy for their gallery. Even at Siron's 
 the precarious state of his clothes was a subject 
 of disquietude. Some windfall had come his way, 
 and so he decided to have a junketing once in 
 a way for his friends. Great were the difficulties 
 Miss Osbourne experienced in removing the effects 
 of the gilding next day from her locks. Several 
 barbers told her that no washing would restore 
 her hair to its original colour ; soap and water 
 only had the effect of making it a sickly green. 
 Sympathetic partners accompanied her in her search 
 for something to remove the tarnished shade from 
 her head, and at last a capable chemist supplied 
 a remedy. The Nugget of Gold had captivated 
 the hearts of several of the artists. Monsieur Julien 
 described his pupil as "a swabble of eyes and 
 teeth." Her stepfather, speaking in rhyme of her 
 in Samoa, endorses this portrait in words : — 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 317 
 
 "Or see, as in a looking-glass, 
 Her pigmy, dimpled person pass, 
 Nought great therein but eyes and hair." 
 
 Those who had known Miss Belle Osbourne in 
 Paris in the winter sang her praises, and so over- 
 came the scruples of the others who complained 
 of the restraint the coming guests would inflict 
 on them, and all prepared to do their best to make 
 Chevillon's a fitting place for the Californians. 
 
 Returning to Gretz, Louis Stevenson was told 
 he was to take the end of the table near the new 
 arrivals, and guide and keep the conversation in 
 his vicinity in correct channels ; so he, for once 
 not in search of adventures, walked in upon a 
 trio who for the rest of his life were to be his 
 fellow-voyagers. Louis filled the place of host 
 judiciously. The other men were well satisfied. 
 He devoted himself to the mother, and never 
 threatened to enter the lists against them for the 
 favour of the taking daughter of sweet seventeen. 
 At first they thought Louis was amiably attaching 
 himself to Mrs. Osbourne to give them fuller oppor- 
 tunity to devote themselves to " Belle," and were 
 astonished to find his attentions to Mrs. Osbourne 
 
3 i8 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 were not disinterested. Louis never seems to have 
 hesitated in his allegiance. From the evening he 
 was elected to the host's chair, and told to talk 
 circumspectly to the new-comers, he fourtd Mrs. 
 Osbourne suited him. Although he revelled in 
 a tussle of arguments which whetted his appetite 
 for battle, he also enjoyed having a sovereign 
 sway, and an undisputed uncontradicted flow to 
 his conversation, when he had a good listener. 
 Mrs. Osbourne smoked with a soothing relish, 
 looking out of her inscrutable eyes straight before 
 her, sphinx-like in her immovableness, but heark- 
 ening all the while, and occasionally showing a 
 flash of teeth in such a rapid smile that some 
 one said it was like sheet lightning. It was, 
 as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, no case of copper 
 against copper, " but alien bloods develop strange 
 currents when they flow close to each other." 
 Those who remember these days at Gretz have 
 recollections of aquatic parties, half the day spent 
 in bathing dresses on the river's edge, or boating 
 on the Luon. Then there were fits of industry 
 after spells of waterside loitering, and the artists 
 tramped off to their motifs, Mrs. Osbourne 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 319 
 
 named one motif in true and terse but unpoetical 
 American language, '?The pinchbug motif,' for 
 it was close to an anthill. Louis acted as porter 
 to her belongings, undeterred by the ominous title 
 suggestive of midges or gadflies. A white um- 
 brella, a stool, an easel, and a pochard box 
 was the artist's kit. Louis bore Mrs. Osbourne's, 
 and some seeing the diminutive pictures of him by 
 Walter Crane in the frontispiece of Travels with a 
 Donkey in the Cevennes, urging sly Modestine up the 
 slope, past our Lady of the Snows, till, silhouetted 
 against the sunset, he is preparing to disappear over 
 the brow of the hill, say it reminded them of him 
 at these times. He never looked his height (five 
 feet ten inches) owing to his stoop, or rather the 
 forward bend of his head ; and when walking 
 alongside any one he had a habit of going a step 
 or two ahead and looking back at his companion, 
 which lessened his appearance of height. As 
 beast of burden for the artist's kit, which was 
 mostly strapped on his back, he started forth 
 jauntily, with Mrs. Osbourne a few steps in the 
 rear, his hands keeping pace with his tongue, his 
 shoulders, which also gesticulated, loaded and 
 
3 2o R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 heightened with his load. The others watched 
 the couple, laughing at their oppositeness in 
 manner and appearance, — Mrs. Osbourne, very 
 short, with her skirts neatly lifted, picking her 
 way steadily, but having to hurry at times to 
 keep up with her long and lean cavalier, who, 
 flourishing his eloquent hands, strode along at 
 a rapid rate. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson had a toe-and-heel pre- 
 ciseness in his walk, which suggested the guinea 
 fowl's undulating progress as he glided along. 
 Going and coming to Mrs. Osbourne's sketching 
 ground Louis led the way, talking as volubly when 
 returning as when he had started out in the fresh- 
 ness of the morning. After the Inland Voyage they 
 did not, as of yore at Chevillon's, sit and amuse 
 themselves solely by talk after the day was done. 
 They clubbed together, and invested in a piano, 
 and danced and sang. There were contests and 
 prizes for all manner of things besides the prize 
 for drawing, which had been fought for at Bar- 
 bizon. Mrs. Osbourne's recitation, in a consistently 
 dead-level voice, of " George Washington and the 
 Pear Tree," won honours for the most monotonous 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 321 
 
 story. They kept a vocabulary, written in char- 
 coal on the white walls, of words which were 
 strange to some in their polyglot assemblage, 
 many being from across the Atlantic. "Murka" 
 headed the list. 
 
 For a couple of years, spring and autumn, 
 from 1876 to 1878, much the same company 
 met at Gretz. The last season there was disunion 
 amongst them, silence and glum looks in the 
 salon instead of jest and badinage. Meals were 
 taken at different times, and the good old com- 
 radeship disappeared. Louis, who had still his 
 boyish love of marshalling puppets on the stage, 
 whether they were paper or flesh and blood ones, 
 tried to drill his artist friends into the places the 
 comedy or drama of their life demanded. There 
 was a talk of a duel, and Louis was eager to 
 have it orthodoxly staged. Miss Osbourne's 
 eyes had led to this romantic climax. Louis was 
 to second one swain. He called a meeting of 
 the community to arrange correctly for every 
 detail. One who had a drolly humorous way 
 of looking on the most serious side of everything, 
 proposed firstly that the mutual piano, which they 
 
 31 
 
322 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 had subscribed for in piping times of peace, 
 should be sold to a rival inn, and pistols and a 
 pick be bought with the proceeds, to enable 
 them (as they were all out of funds) to fight 
 the duel, and then to bury the one who fell, 
 " far in the forest shade." This plan evoked 
 laughter, at which the earnest Louis was sorely 
 annoyed. He hated ridicule when he was en- 
 gaged on any " make-believe," and the chance 
 of a real live duel, about a lady fair too, was 
 not likely to come in his way again in this 
 unromantic century. The would-be duellists' 
 weapons were not forthcoming. One pistol, 
 rusty and incompetent, existed. There was no 
 money to buy more ; but the piano was not sold, 
 and the duelling fever died out. 
 
 Meanwhile the century was growing beyond 
 its seventies, and before it reached its eighth 
 decade Louis Stevenson's road had diverged 
 widely from the path of those who knew him 
 in his Edinburgh days. He went off Across 
 the Plains to the magnet which drew him to a 
 far country. The barriers to his marriage with 
 Mrs. Osbourne were removed by a divorce, and 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 323 
 
 he married her in San Francisco, and became 
 for a space a "Silverado Squatter." He only 
 returned on brief visits to Edinburgh. He tried 
 a summer or two in Scotland, one up in the 
 clear northland air at Braemar, where, to amuse 
 Sam Osbourne, he began Treasure Island. 
 
 In 1 88 1 he became a candidate for the Chair 
 of Constitutional Law and History in Edinburgh 
 University, for it was the one post in his Alma 
 Mater for which he felt himself fitted. His 
 parents were anxious to have him near them, 
 and the earnings by his pen were very small, 
 not enough to support his delicate self and his 
 wife and son. He could again truly say, "It 
 was a comfortable thought to me that I had a 
 father." His chance of success was small, 
 although the retiring Professor, Sheriff ./Eneas 
 Mackay, urged him to stand. His fame was 
 only dawning then. His father's luncheon Bibles 
 and his popular Jekyl and Hyde were about 
 his only published volumes. To Law he had 
 paid no court. He had shown to the public no 
 interest in history, he had not then even written 
 a footnote. May be, as he was one of the weak 
 
324 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 ones the vicious climate had not killed in infancy, 
 he might have lived the longer in his weather- 
 beaten but healthful City of the Winds, if he had 
 been appointed. There is an amusing sketch 
 by his step-daughter, Belle (then Mrs. Strong), of 
 Louis teaching history to her small son, Austin. 
 Mrs. Stevenson, senior, when in Samoa, took 
 the boy's education into her hands, and told him to 
 remember not many were schooled by so antique a 
 relative as their great-grandmother. Louis gave 
 him history lectures. Mrs. Strong has portrayed 
 Austin, his hair on end, his hands clutching his 
 knees for support, and leaning as far back as 
 the wall allows, while his historian's back is only 
 seen, his arms uplifted, his thin fingers stretched 
 out. One can somehow see by the reflection of 
 his tale on Austin's face that it is a gruesome and 
 a bloody story, such as Scotch history supplies 
 freely. Though R. L. S. became only a history 
 lecturer to his household, he evidently was a 
 fearsomely eloquent one. 
 
 Louis tried to find health at Davos and Hyeres, 
 but finally built a house at Bournemouth, with 
 the name of a strong tower on its lintel, Skerry- 
 
TRAVEL SONGS 325 
 
 vore. Then the gipsy glamour came over him 
 once more, and he roved further afield. In 1887 
 he tried Saranac, and later began his Pacific 
 voyaging, which ended in his settling among the 
 engaging barbarism of Samoa. In 1881, when 
 he was at Pitlochrie, he wrote to me, apologising 
 for not doing so sooner, " for I have been steadily 
 travelling, and that tires me shockingly now-a- 
 days." I was on the eve of an Antipodean trip, 
 and in a postscript he says, " It seems a long way 
 to go. Remember me to New Zealand when you 
 see it." This little jest at the end was like him, 
 a flicker of nonsense ; for he little thought then 
 that Brighter Britain and he were to be neighbours. 
 His health for a while seemed restored in the 
 far-off South, but he overwrought at his mastered 
 vocation. "On one of the hottest days I have 
 ever known in Samoa," said Mr. Bazett Haggard, 
 who had been at Vailima on the 3rd December, 
 1894, "Stevenson was continuously at work." 
 This strenuous energy in one highly strung and 
 never robust had the fatal termination which was 
 inevitable. Louis had hoped and prayed his end, 
 when it came, would be mercifully swift. Even 
 
326 R. L. STEVENSON'S EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 his desire to die in his boots was granted to him. 
 With no great shadow to darken his path he 
 had, as he said of his father, " a happy life ; nor 
 was he less fortunate in his tleath, which, at the 
 last, came to him unaware." His right hand, we 
 know by the strength with which he drew Weir 
 of Hermiston, never lost its cunning, nor ever 
 did he forget thee, Auld Reekie ! 
 
 When the voice of love fell, toneless, on his 
 closing ears, perchance it was granted him to hear 
 once more 
 
 " The old cry of the wind 
 In our inclement city ? " 
 
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