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THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

CHAPTER I

HIS ANCESTORS

The ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly ;

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I am bound in and in with my forbears. We are all nobly born; fortunate those who know it; blessed those who remember."-R. L. S., Letters, ii. 230.

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The sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny."-R. L. S., Dedication of Catriona.

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T is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees," "" as Stevenson once wrote, that we can follow back the careers of our component parts and be reminded of our ante-natal lives." But the threads are many and tangled, and it is hard to distinguish for more than a generation or two the transmission of the characteristics that are combined in any individual of our own day. When a man has been dead for a hundred years, it is seldom that anything is remembered of him but his name and his occupation; he has become no more than a link in a pedigree, and the personal disposition is forgotten which made him loved or feared, together with the powers that gained

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him success, or the weaknesses that brought about his failure. Therefore it is no unusual circumstance that, while we can trace the line of Stevenson's ancestors on either side for two and four hundred years respectively, our knowledge of them, in any real sense of the word, begins only at the end of the eighteenth century. After that date we have four portraits, drawn in part by his own hand, together with the materials for another sketch; in these may be discerned some of the traits and faculties which went to make up a personality so unusual, so fascinating, and so deeply loved.

The record of his father's people opens in 1675 with the birth of a son, Robert, to James Stevenson," presumably a tenant farmer " of Nether Carsewell in the parish of Neilston, some ten miles to the south-west of Glasgow. Robert's son, a maltster in Glasgow, had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born 1749, and Alan, born June, 1752.

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With these two brothers my story begins," their descendant wrote in A Family of Engineers. deaths were simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full. Tradition whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home," almost before they had reached the years of manhood. In 1774 Alan was summoned to the West Indies by Hugh. An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to be told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island to another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the tropics, and simultaneously struck down. The dates and places of their deaths would seem to indicate a more scattered and prolonged pursuit." At all events, in something like the course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five, the other twenty-two."

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Alan left behind him a wife and one child, Robert, aged two, the future engineer of the Bell Rock, who was destined to be the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. The widow was daughter of David Lillie, a Glasgow builder, several times Deacon of the Wrights, but had lost her father only a month before her husband's death, and for the time, at any rate, mother and son were almost destitute. She was, however, a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to contend with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like that these misfortunes heated. Like so many other widowed Scotswomen, she vowed her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to her ambition.' He made no great figure at the schools in Edinburgh to which she could afford to send him; but before he was fifteen there occurred an event which changed his own destiny and moulded that of his descendants-the second marriage of his mother."

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The new husband was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas Smith," a widower of thirty-three with children, who is described as " a man ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs, and prospering in them far beyond the average.' He was, among other things, a shipowner and underwriter; but chiefly he "founded a solid business in lamps and oils, and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside Company's Works-' a multifarious concern of tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brassfounders, blacksmiths, and japanners.' Consequently, in August 1786, less than a year before his second marriage, "having designed a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive coal fires before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newlyformed Board of Northern Lighthouses.".

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The profession was a new one, just beginning to grow in the hands of its first practitioners; in it Robert Stevenson found his vocation and so entered with great zest into the pursuits of his stepfather. The public usefulness of the service would appeal

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to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh expedients stimulate his ingenuity. And there was another attraction which, in the young man at least, appealed to, and perhaps first aroused a profound and enduring sentiment of romance; I mean the attrac tion of the life. The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road, the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences. At the age of nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority, superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde. change of aim seems to have caused or been accompanied by a change of character. It sounds absurd to couple the name of my grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had been destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of Latin, was at least no unusual student. From the day of his charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end-a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of self-improvement. Thenceforward his summers were spent directing works and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the University of Edinburgh, to improve himself in

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