eloquent farewell to sun, moon and stars and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of the drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses' tails—a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at their head who was to return in a different temper, make a bold dash that staggered Scotland, and die happily in the thick of the fight....

"The palace of Holyrood is a house of many memories.... Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom levées and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours....

"There is an old story of the subterranean passage between the castle and Holyrood and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey; the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt, but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stands beside St. Giles, when they hear the crone of his pipes reascending from the earth below their horses' feet."

In Edinburgh to-day there are armed men and cannon in the castle high up on the great rock above you: "You may see the troops marshalled on the high parade, and at night after the early winter evenfall and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sounds of drums and bugles." [3]

Long before Louis could write he made up verses and stories for himself, and Cummie wrote them down for him. "I thought they were rare nonsense then," she said, little dreaming that these same bits of "rare nonsense" were the beginnings of what was to make "her boy" famous across two seas in years to come.

He writes of her when speaking of long nights he lay awake unable to sleep because of a troublesome cough: "How well I remember her lifting me out of bed, carrying me to the window and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of garden, where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning."

Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life. One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the Juvenilia was called "Nurses." Fifteen years later came the publication of the "Child's Garden of Verses" with a splendid tribute to her as a dedication. He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters to her, and invited her to visit him. She herself tells that the last time she ever saw him he said to her, "before a room full of people, 'It's you that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,' 'Me, Master Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay, woman,' said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.'"

When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.

This was Louis's first real literary attempt. He was not able to write himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.

He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, "it was the desire of his heart to be an author."

During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, usually called Bob, visited them; a great treat for Louis, not only because his ill health kept him from making many companions of his own age, but because Bob loved many of the same things he did and to "make believe" was as much a part of his life as Louis's. Many fine games they had together; built toy theatres, the scenery and characters for which they bought for a "penny plain and twopence colored," and were never tired of dressing up. One of their chief delights, he says, was in "rival kingdoms of our own invention—Nosingtonia and Encyclopædia, of which we were perpetually drawing maps." Even the eating of porridge at breakfast became a game. Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while Louis's was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by bit.

In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. Not only was there the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote:

"Chief of our aunts—not only I,
But all the dozen nurslings cry—
What did the other children do?
And what was childhood, wanting you?"

Colinton Manse

If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson, Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at Colinton.

Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We children admired him, partly for his beautiful face and silver hair ... partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone writing sermons or letters to his scattered family.... The study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures gaudily colored and dear to young eyes.... When I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture."

"There were two ways of entering the Manse garden," he says, "one the two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton and the other a door for pedestrians on the side next the kirk.... On the left hand were the stables, coach-houses and washing houses, clustered around a small, paved court.... Once past the stable you were fairly within the garden. On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally steeped in sunshine....

"The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden, and called the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to play in it.... Even out of the 'witches' walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you, with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright