which is one of the glories of the village. Under the circuit of its wide, black branches, it was always dark and cool, and there was a green scurf over all the trunk among which glistened the round bright drops of resin. This was a sufficiently gloomy commencement for the Witches' Walk; but its chief horror was the retaining wall of the kirkyard itself, about which we were always hovering at even with the strange attraction of fear. Often after nightfall have I looked long and eagerly from the manse windows to see the 'spunkies' playing among the graves, and have been much chagrined at my failure; and this very name of spunkie recalls to me the most important of our discoveries in the supernatural walk. Henrietta, Willie (my cousins) and I, just about dusk, discovered a burning eye looking out from a hole in the retaining wall, in the corner where it joins the back of the stable. In hushed tones we debated the question; whether it was some bird of ill omen roosting in the cranny of the wall, or whether the hole pierced right through into a grave, and it was some dead man who was sitting up in his coffin and watching us with that strange fixed eye. If you remember the level of the churchyard, you will see that this explanation suited pretty well; so we drew a wheelbarrow into the corner; one after another got up and looked in; and when the last was satisfied, we turned round, took to our heels, and never stopped till we were in the shelter of the house. We ourselves, in our after-discussions, thought it might have been the bird, though we preferred the more tremendous explanation. But for my own part, I sim

ply believe that we saw nothing at all. The fact is, we would have given anything to have seen a ghost, or to persuade ourselves that we had seen a ghost. ... I remember going down into the cellars of our own house intown, in company with another, and persuading myself that I saw a face looking at me from round a corner; and I may even confess, since the laws against sorcery have been for some time in abeyance, that I essayed at divers times to bring up the devil, founding my incantations on no more abstruse a guide than Skelt's Juvenile Drama of Der Freischütz. I am about at the end of horrors now; even out of the Witches' Walk, you saw the manse facing towards you, with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on each side of it; flower-plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious belief-namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any footprints that he saw to compare the measurement at night with the boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a strategic movement of the foot, to make the mark longer.

...

"So much for the garden; now follow me into the house. On entering by the front-door you had before you a stone-paved lobby, with doors on either hand, that extended the whole length of the house. There stood a case of foreign birds, two or three marble deities from India, and a lily of the Nile in a pot; and at the far end the stairs shut in the view... With how many games of "tig" or brick-building in

the forenoon is the long low dining-room connected in my mind.

"But that room is principally dear to me from memories of the time when I, a sickly child, stayed there alone. First, in the forenoon about eleven, how my aunt' used to open the storeroom at the one end and give me out three Albert biscuits and some calf-foot jelly in a black pot with a sort of raised white pattern over it. That storeroom was a most voluptuous place with its piles of biscuit boxes and spice tins, the rack for buttered eggs, the little window that let in sunshine and the flickering shadow of leaves.

.. "But I come to the crown of my diningroom reminiscences, for after dinner, when the lamp was brought in and shaded, and my aunt sat down to read in the rocking-chair, there was a great open space behind the sofa left entirely in the shadow. This was my especial domain: once round the corner of the sofa, I had left the lightsome, merry indoors, and was out in the cool, dark night. I could

1 "I have mentioned my aunt. In her youth she was a wit and a beauty, very imperious, managing and self-sufficient. But as she grew up, she began to suffice for all the family as well. An accident on horseback made her nearly deaf and blind, and suddenly transformed this wilful empress into the most serviceable and amiable of women. There were thirteen of the Balfours as (oddly enough) there were of the Stevensons also, and the children of the family came home to her to be nursed, to be educated, to be mothered, from the infanticidal climate of India. There must sometimes have been half a score of us children about the manse; and all were born a second time from Aunt Jane's tenderness." Jane Whyte Balfour, "chief of our Aunts," of A Child's Garden of Verses, died at the age of ninety-one in 1907, the last of her generation, stone deaf and nearly blind, but with a keener interest in all be. longing to her than any of her juniors, and a greater zest in life.

almost see the stars. I looked out of the back window at the bushes outside. I lay in the darkest corners, rifle in hand, like a hunter in a lonely bivouac. I crawled about stealthily watching the people in the circle of lamplight, with some vague remembrance of a novel that my aunt had read to me, where some fellow went out from 'the heated ballroom' and moralised in the 'Park.""

His mother and his nurse also, as we have seen, read to him, indefatigably, and so it was not until he was eight years old that he took any pleasure in reading to himself. The consciousness of this delight came upon him suddenly; its coming was connected in his memory with a book called Paul Blake, "a visit to the country, and an experience unforgettable. The day had been warm; Henrietta and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy-tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall; for it was then that I knew that I loved reading."

This day must have been followed closely by the evening recorded in another essay. "Out of all the years of my life I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these (when he returned with some new

play for his toy-theatre), and that was on the night when I brought back with me the Arabian Entertainments in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a 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."

Although an only child and rendered more solitary by illness, Louis was not without companions, drawn (as often happens in early years) chiefly from the crowded ranks of his cousins, of whom he was nearly sure to find some at Colinton. By them he seems to have been treated, as Sir Sidney Colvin so happily says, "as something of a small sickly prince;" over them he cast the spell of his imagination in devising games, and they submitted to the force of his character in accepting the rules which he saw fit to allot. "We children had naturally many plays together," he says of Colinton; "I usually insisted on the lead, and was invariably exhausted to death by the evening. I can still remember what a fury of play would descend upon me." Of his games he wrote: "I was the best player of hide and seek going; not a good runner, I was up to every shift and dodge, I could jink very well, I could crawl without any noise through leaves, I could hide under a carrot plant; it used to be my favourite boast that I always walked into the den."

The country and the summer months gave him more companions, but the whole winter of 1856-57