CHAPTER II CHILDHOOD ... 'With love divine My mother's fingers folded mine.' -- From Verses in an American Paper . 'We built a ship upon the stairs, All made of the back bedroom chairs; And filled it full of sofa pillows, To go a-sailing on the billows.' -- R. L. Stevenson.

Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who were married in 1848, made their first home at 8 Howard Place, and there, on 13th November 1850, Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born. In 1853 they moved to a house in Inverleith Terrace, and in 1857, when Louis was about seven years old, they took possession of 17 Heriot Row, the house so long and so intimately associated with them in the minds of their many friends.

The little Louis was from his earliest babyhood a very delicate child, and only the most constant and tender care of his devoted mother and nurse enabled him to survive those first years which must have been so full of anxiety to his parents. In The Child's Garden of Verses there are some lines called 'The Land of Counterpane,' the picture heading of which is a tiny child propped up against his bed pillows, and with all his toys scattered on the coverlet. Beneath it are four verses that give a wonderfully graphic description of the life the little boy too often led.

In the last verse he was a giant who saw before him all 'the pleasant land of counterpane,' and in the very word 'pleasant' the temperament of the child shows itself. How many children would have found anything 'pleasant' in the enforced days of lie-a-bed quietness, and would have made no murmurs over the hard fate which forbade to them the active joys of other boys and girls?

But this small lad had a sweet temper and an unselfish, contented disposition, and so he bore the burden of his bad health as bravely in those days as he did in after years, and made for himself plays and pleasures with his nimble brain while his weary body was often tired and restless in that bed whereof he had so much. His mother used to describe, with the same graphic touch that gives life to all her son wrote, the bright games the little fellow invented for himself when he was well enough to be up and about, and tell how, in a corner of the room, he made for himself a wonder-world all his own, in which heroes and heroines of romance loved and fought and walked and talked at the bidding of the wizard in frock and pinafore.

It was not all indoor life happily, and if there were many bad days there were some good and glad ones also, when he was well and allowed to be out and at play in the world of outdoor life he always loved so dearly.

Two quaint pictures of the child as he was in those days have been supplied by his aunt, Miss Balfour. One of them is from a note-book of his mother's, in which she had jotted down a few things that had been said or written of him. The first interesting description is that given by a very dear old friend of the family, and is an exceedingly early one, for it was written in October 1853, when Louis was barely three, and the family had just settled in Inverleith Terrace.

'One day,' she says, 'I called and missed you, and found Cummie' (the valued nurse) 'and Louis just starting for town, so we walked up together by Canonmills, keeping the middle of the road all the way.'

Louis, she continues, was dressed in a navy blue pelisse trimmed with fur, a beaver hat, a fur ruff, and white gloves. A very quaint little figure he must have been with the thin delicate face and the wonderfully bright eyes, so luminous and far-seeing even then!

The tiny mite repeated hymns all the way, 'emphasising so prettily,' the friend goes on to say, 'with the dear little baby hands. All of a sudden, when near St Mary's Church he stood still, and looking in my face, said:

'"But by-the-bye did I ever give you my likeness?"

'"No," was the reply, "have you got your likeness?"

'"Oh! yes, I will give it you; I will send it by the real post to-morrow."'

'It seemed,' the lady adds, 'as if the wonderful little mind had been considering what other kind thing he could do besides repeating the hymns.'

The whole incident is an excellent example of his sweetness of disposition, and his innate thoughtfulness for others. It is pleasant to know that the pretty promise was fulfilled, Mrs Stevenson herself acting 'postman,' and taking the likeness to her friend next day.

The second picture is from the memory of Miss Balfour herself. She too describes the blue pelisse trimmed with grey astrakhan, which he wore in the winter of 1853 and '54. In the spring of 1854 she went to the Stevensons' house to tell her sister that their father had been given the degree of Doctor of Divinity. The small Louis, on hearing his grandfather spoken of as 'Doctor,' immediately said:

'Now that grandpapa is a doctor, surely you'll have him instead of Dr Hunter?'

A wonderfully quick thought and old-fashioned remark from a child not four years old, but a suggestively sad one too; he already knew so well the necessity of a doctor to help human bodies, although he could not yet comprehend the use of one for the 'cure' of human souls!

When he heard that his aunt was going to see a relative in Saxe Coburg Place, he begged to be allowed to go with her, and, the permission granted, started off in great pride on his very first expedition without his nurse, that faithful friend of the Stevenson family having promised to follow later to take him home. The aunt at least had cause to remember that walk! He had started gloveless, and would not go back for his gloves, but popped his cold hands under the cape of his pelisse, and even then, unconventional as to clothing, said cheerfully:

'That will keep them from John Frost.'

So the pair set out on what proved a chilly and prolonged excursion; for, in spite of all remonstrances, the child calmly sat down on every doorstep and rested till he felt inclined to go on again, to the no small dismay of his aunt, who knew how serious a thing the taking of a cold was to the placid little personage smiling at her from the steps.

During the Crimean war, while he was still a very tiny mite, he, entirely of his own accord, always prayed for the soldiers. When asked by his mother if he would like to be a soldier, his answer was—

'I would neither like to kill nor to be killed,'—a very sensible reason to have been thought out by so young a child.

His aunt says of him—

And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed. Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best.

Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie' lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and to whom he sings—

With these two cousins the favourite game was the fleeing from, conquering, and finally slaying a huge giant called Bunker, invented by Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted the manse garden, and required continual killing. One time, on the Bonaly Road, they were shipwrecked hungry sailors, who ate so many buttercups that the little boys were poisoned and became very ill, and the little girl only escaped because she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy memories' they sailed ships richly laden with whin pods for vanilla, and yellow lichen for gold. They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse candles, and were much disappointed they never saw anything more terrible, in the gruesome place where the sexton kept his tools, than a swaying 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 charming paper, 'The Manse,' in Memories and Portraits, that he had not much in common with the old man although 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 admirably pictures in the verses addressed to an Anglo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has returned to the India of her birth.

It is worth mentioning—as a note by the way which illustrates that abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew him—that four particularly hideous Indian idols stood guard 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 them were smaller and made in a kneeling posture, and, as something 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 them soundly when we were about it!'

In the manse garden at Colinton there was a mysterious and delightful gap that gave egress to the Water of Leith, and to pass through this and stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and wet world beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were already loudly calling to him to take 'the road' his wandering soul so dearly loved.

'Keepsake Mill' is a charming tribute to the joys of those illicit escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfellows now scattered in far lands, or for ever at rest from life's labour, who played in the garden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in their games.

One sweet fancy of the imaginative child, who all his life had a fine mental and physical courage in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard wall was 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 much of suffering, he held fast, after a fashion of his own, the belief that goes deeper than his playful rendering of it in The Unseen Playmate seems at first to infer:

A faith that was taught him by an earnest father and by the loving voice of a mother who held it fast through 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 family and friends,—Mr Henderson reports: 'Robert's reading is not loud, but impressive.'

In July he was in bed with scarlet fever on his examination day, which was a great disappointment to him. He had a first prize for reading 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 was written 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 compete that he was finally included among the competitors, and did a paper which though not best was still good 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 time was a fierce story of shipwreck and fighting with savages.

In 1863 he was sent for a few months to a boarding school kept by a Mr Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. Life at a boarding school was misery to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis, and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In Random Memories he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is taken. It was, he says, this miserable feeling of suspense that made him share his sorrows with a desolate, but amiable cat in the Easter Road, which mingled its woes with 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 made an early and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights 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 became very homesick and unhappy, and the regular 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 months had been too great a trial for his health, and he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed some very bracing treatment of which the youthful patient highly disapproved.

Of the home where so much consideration was shown to a child's health and feelings, no better description can be given than the graphic one of a little Stevenson cousin who had gone with his parents to stay there, and who thus spoke of it: 'A child who never cries, a nurse who is never cross, and late dinners.'

Can one imagine a dignified, childish paradise that could go much further! Nor were the joys of books awanting to the happy small boy who describes himself as in early days being carried off by his nurse

As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous reader, and could, from his eighth year, pass happy hours with a book, any book so long as it did not mean lessons.

He was before very long a book-buyer as well as a book-lover, and he has for ever immortalised, in the charming pages of A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, that old bookshop (late J. L. Smith) at the corner of Leith Walk, where eager boys without coppers were but coldly received, but whence the fortunate capitalist could emerge, after having spent his Saturday pocket-money, the proud possessor of plays positively bristling with pirates and highwaymen. With these treasures he fled home in the gathering dusk, while 'Leerie-Light-the-Lamps' was kindling his cheery beacons along the streets, and, with pleasant terrors, devoured the weird productions, finally adding to their weirdness by the garish contents of a child's paint-box.

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