class is scrupulously noted, and that, we may be sure, with no encouragement from his father. When he was small, she read to him a great deal, and to her he owed his first acquaintance with much that is best in literature. Almost every scrap of his writing that ever passed into her hands was treasured. His first efforts at tales or histories, taken down by herself, or some other amanuensis, before he was able or willing to write; nearly every letter he ever sent her; every compliment to him, and every word of praise-all were carefully preserved, long before he showed any definite promise of becoming famous; and by her method and accuracy she was able to record for his biographer, with hardly an exception, where he spent each month of his life.

The son's attachment to his mother was no less deep and lasting. Through all her illnesses and whenever she needed his care, he was always most sedulous and affectionate, displaying at times a tenderness almost feminine. The most irregular of correspondents, he was well-nigh regular to her; master of his pen though he was, several times after he had become a man of letters he bursts out into impatience at the difficulty he finds in expressing to her and to his father the depth of his affection and gratitude to

them both.

After his father's death, when the doctors had ordered him to go to America, if he wanted to live, he wrote to her: Not only would we not go to America without you; we should not persist in trying it, if we did not believe that it would be on the whole the best for you." From that time, but for two absences in Scotland, she made her home with him and his family, and had the reward of realising that the exile which severed him from so many of his friends had brought her to an even more intimate knowledge of his life and an even closer place in his affection.

CHAPTER III

INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD-1850-59

"I please myself often by saying that I had a Covenanting childhood."-R. L. S., MS. fragment.

"I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives."-R, L. S., Letters, ii. 107.

ROB

OBERT LEWIS BALFOUR STEVENSON was born at No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th November 1850, and a few days after his birth was baptized by his grandfather, the minister of Colinton, according to the Scots custom, in his father's house. He was called after his two grandfathers, and to their names that of his mother's family was added.1

His birthplace was the home which Thomas Stevenson had prepared for his bride two years before; a

1It was as Robert Louis Stevenson that he was known. to all the world, and the earlier variations of his name, remembered but by few, are of small importance. Nevertheless it may be as well to set them down here.

"

In his earliest letters, and down to 1865, the boy signed himself R. Stevenson.' After that he occasionally used "R. L. B. Stevenson," but in 1868 asked his mother in place of this to address him as "Robert Lewis." For the next five years he was generally but not invariably R. L. Stevenson," until about 1873 the final change is marked by his usage and an undated letter to Mr. Baxter belonging to this period (now the property of the Savile Club). After several years of feeble and ineffectual endeavour with regard to my third initial (a thing I loathe), I have been led to put myself out of reach of such accident in the future by taking my first two names in full."

The change of the name of Lewis from the Scots form to the French was made when he was about eighteen ; the exact date is not easy to fix on account of his practice of using the initial only in his signature at that period. It was only the spelling that Stevenson changed and never the pronunciation: Lewis he remained at all times in the mouth of his family and of his intimate friends.

27

small, unpretentious, comfortable stone house, forming part of a row still standing, situated on low ground just to the north of the Water of Leith. Two and a half years later this was changed for No. 1 Inverleith Terrace, a more commodious dwelling on the other side of the same road; but that, having three outside walls, proved too cold for the delicate boy. Accordingly, in 1857, the little family of three-for Louis remained an only child-moved half a mile further south into what was then the centre of the New Town, and occupied No. 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their home in Edinburgh for thirty years. This was a substantial house of grey stone, built with the solidity so customary in Scotland and now so unusual in the South, looking across the Queen Street Gardens, where the lilacs bloom in spring and the pipe of the blackbird may still be heard; while from its back windows could be seen the hills of "the kingdom of Fife."

For the first year of his life the infant seemed healthy and made satisfactory progress. But with his mother's brightness of disposition he had unfortunately inherited also from her a weakness of chest and a susceptibility to cold, which affected the whole course of his life.

"

My ill-health principally chronicles itself by the terrible long nights that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body. I principally connect these nights, however, with our third house, in Heriot Row ; and cannot mention them without a grateful testimony to the unwearied sympathy and long-suffering displayed to me on a hundred such occasions by my good nurse. It seems to me that I should have died if I had been left there alone to cough and weary in the darkness. 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 gardens; where also, we told each other,

there might be sick little boys and their nurses wait. ing, like us, for the morning. Other night scenes connected with my ill-health were the little sallies of delirium that used to waken me out of a feverish sleep in such agony of terror as, thank God, I have never suffered since. My father had generally to come up and sit by my bedside, and feign conversations with guards or coachmen or inn-keepers, until I was gradually quieted and brought to myself; but it was long after one of those paroxysms before I could bear to be left alone.

"That I was eminently religious, there can be no doubt. I had an extreme terror of Hell, implanted in me, I suppose, by my good nurse, which used to haunt me terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite. I remember that the noises on such occasions always grouped themselves for me into the sound of a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of the street and away up the hill into town; I think even now that I hear the terrible howl of his passage, and the clinking that I used to attribute to his bit and stirrups. On such nights I would lie awake and pray and cry, until I prayed and cried myself asleep; and if I can form any notion of what an earnest prayer should be, I imagine that mine were such.

66

Although I was never done drawing and painting, and even kept on doing so until I was seventeen or eighteen, I never had any real pictorial vision, and instead of trying to represent what I saw, was merely imitating the general appearance of other people's representations. I never drew a picture of anything that was before me, but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I beautifully illustrated my lack of real feeling for art, by a very early speech, which I have had repeated to me by my mother : "Mamma," said I, "I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

His nurse was, it will already be seen, even more

66

than is usual with children, an important factor in his life. When he was eighteen months old, Alison Cunningham-" Cummie to him for the rest of his days-came to him and watched over his childhood with the most intense devotion. She refused, it is said, an offer of marriage, that she might not have to leave her charge, and she remained with the family long after the care of him had passed out of women's hands, never taking another place, as indeed she had no need to do. Her true reward has been a monument of gratitude for which a parallel is hard to find. At twenty (an age when young men are not generally very tender to such memories) Louis wrote the paper on Nurses printed in Juvenilia. Fifteen years later the dedication of the Child's Garden was To Alison Cunningham, From Her Boy," and this was but the preface to one of the happiest sets of verses in one of the happiest books. Of all his works he sent her copies; throughout his life he wrote letters to her; when he had a house, he had her to stay with him, and even proposed to bring her out on a visit to Samoa, In another fragment of autobiography he has again described her services: My recollection of the long nights when I was kept awake by coughing are only relieved by the thought of the tenderness of my nurse and second mother (for my first will not be jealous), Alison Cunningham. She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help and console me till the whole sorrow of the night was at an end with the arrival of the first of that long string of country carts, that in the dark hours of the morning, with the neighing of horses, the cracking of the whips, the shouts of drivers, and a hundred other wholesome noises, creaked, rolled, and pounded past my window."

་་

Thus she tended his bodily life, watchfully and unweariedly to his spiritual welfare, as she conceived it, she gave, if possible, even greater care. His father and mother were both genuinely religious people: the former clung, with a desperate intensity, to the