Part 2 (1/2)

'I never knew so sweet a child'

And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were beautiful On one subject only mother and child soree with hirandpapa's home was the nicest in the world, but the randfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, theplace Here 'Auntie'

lived, and near here, too, was the horeith hie connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and to whoht These rhyarden play You two, reen, Withand queen, Were soldier, hunter, tar, And all the thousand things that children are'

With these two cousins the favourite gae giant called Bunker, invented by Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted theOne tiry sailors, who ate so many buttercups that the little boys were poisoned and becairl only escaped because she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy memories' they sailed shi+ps richly laden hin pods for vanilla, and yellow lichen for gold They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse candles, and wererueso branch of ivy

Of the tall, pale, venerable grandfather, with his snowy hair, Louis stood a good deal in awe; and he tells us in his char paper, 'The Manse,' in _Memories and Portraits_, that he had not h he felt honoured by his connection with a person reverend enough to enter the pulpit and preach the sermon every Sunday

So many Balfours were scattered over the world, in India and the Colonies, that the old rooms at the manse were full of eastern curiosities and nick-nacks from distant lands dear to the hearts of little folks And, while the garden was a bower of delight, the house was a veritable treasure trove to the grandchildren from far and near who played in it

To Robert Louis Stevenson, with his mind full of romance, it must have been a paradise indeed, and one that he adlo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has returned to the India of her birth

It is worth --as a note by the hich illustrates that abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew hiuard at the hall door of 'The Turret,' the house of his uncle, John Balfour, at Leven

Two of them were life-size with their hands discreetly folded in prayer, two of the posture, and, as so rattled if you shook them, it was our juvenile belief that treasure was concealed inside their bodies This idea Mr R L Stevenson eagerly fostered in the slightly younger generation, and, with the love of harmless mischief natural to him, implored us to 'rattle thearden at Colinton there was a ress to the Water of Leith, and to pass through this and stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and orld beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were already loudly calling to hi soul so dearly loved

'Keepsake Mill' is a char tribute to the joys of those illicit escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfello scattered in far lands, or for ever at rest froarden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in their gainative child, who all his life had a fine e in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard as at one place high above the garden it partially enclosed, and the little boy, afflicted with no superstitious terrors, had an idea that the souls of the dead people at rest in 'God's acre,' peeped out at him from the chinks of the wall And one feels sure that here as all through his life, shadowed by so , he held fast, after a fashi+on of his own, the belief that goes deeper than his playful rendering of it in _The Unseen Playmate_ seems at first to infer:

'Whene'er you're happy and cannot tell why, The Friend of the children is sure to be by'

A faith that was taught hi voice of a h her own happy childhood and the joys and sorrows that as wife and mother came to her in later years

After the death of the Rev Dr Balfour, in April 1860, the manse ceased to be the second home of Louis Stevenson, and in the November of that year his aunt, Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who stayed with her moved to a house in Howard Place

In 1858 he went to school, and from 1860 to 1861 he and his cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, were together at Mr Henderson's preparatory school in India Street from which both went to the Academy in 1861 Of Lewis Stevenson,--who in later life was always called Louis or Lou by his fa is not loud, but impressive'

In July he was in bed with scarlet fever on his exareat disappoint that year; but his zeal over school and lessons was very short-lived, and he never hungered for scholastic honours

As a child he did not learn quickly, and he was in his eighth year before he could read fluently for himself Nevertheless his especial bent showed itself early, and when in his sixth year he dictated a _History of Moses_, which he illustrated, giving the men pipes in their mouths This, and an account of _Travels in Perth_, composed in his ninth year, are still in existence The _History of Moses_ ritten because an uncle had offered a prize to his own children for the best paper on the subject, and the little Louis was so disappointed at not being asked to co the coood and which was given a prize He had begun to print it for himself, with much toil, but his mother offered to write it out from his dictation Another composition of this ties

In 1863 he was sent for a fewGrove, near London Life at a boarding school wasat his oill as the small Louis, and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving ho to school, and expresses his belief that it is not so ht or day at school that is so terrible to a courageous child, as the dis hos, and the painful suspense for soe into the neorld of school is taken It was, he says, thisof suspense that made him share his sorroith a desolate, but aled its ith his and as it purred against him consoled him

His tender-hearted parents were so touched by his evident affliction, and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a trip round the coast of Fife in _The Pharos_ and he thus hts and harbours which his father had gone to inspect

Although the cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, who had been his schoolfellow in Edinburgh, and two of his younger brothers were day pupils at the Spring Grove School, and his aunt, Miss Balfour, was living near, he becaular school work, with its impositions and punishments, fretted him and made him so ill, that in December his father, who had been at Mentone with his mother, hastily returned and took him away from school It was too late, however, the few reat a trial for his health, and he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed sohly disapproved