Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 6

of his canoe. "On my tomb, if ever I have one," he wrote, "I mean to get these words inscribed, HE CLUNG TO HIS PADDLE." The paddle he chose was his pen. It was the motive power which forwarded him along the river of life, through shoals and rapids. When but a wee toddling bairn, he drew his nurse aside and commanded her to write, as he had a story to tell. He dictated to his mother, too, when a boy of six, an essay on Moses. As a housebound child, he had to amuse himself. Skelt's dramas were then his delight; but the life of every child is a prophecy for those who know how to interpret it. His mother was prescient, and fore-told her white-faced Louis had the light of genius in those windows of the soul--the eyes. "Talent," she knew, "was the result of human labor and culture." He dreamed, when but four, he "heard the noise of pens writing." She took it and his childish "Songstries" he sung as an earnest of his future.
Louis' father, despite being, like Dr. John Brown's Rab, "fu' o' seriousness," had odd whims, among others, an objection to schools and lessons, so he raised no objection to his son's regulation school-days being intermittent. When barely in his teens, Stevenson was ordered South, and spent two winters abroad. He was a pupil at Edinburgh Academy for a few years. Andrew Lang was there at the same time; but, he explains, the future Tusitala,--"the lover of children, the teller of tales, giver of counsel, and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,"--and he did not meet there, for Louis was "but a little whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some lower class," when his future brother author was "an elderly boy of seventeen." The pity was that the cosseted only son never rubbed against his compatriot children in the discipline of the play- fields, but in some of his summer holidays he tasted of the doubtful pleasures of lantern-bearing and other boyish "glories of existence."
When the lad was seventeen, his parents leased Swanston Cottage, which became their summer home, and a big factor in their boy's education. It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist--the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey houses, looked for their familiar outline when winter prisoned him in Auld Reekie.
These pastoral hills, with their sweeps of heathy moorlands, appear from first to last in his works. Two of his initial Memories and Portraits depict his hill-folk neighbors, the Shepherd and the Gardener. It was at a church "atween the muckle Pentland's knees" that Archie Weir of Hermiston noted young Kirsty, and that same "little cruciform place" was the scene of his "PETIT POEME EN PROSE," where we can all spend a peaceful "Lowden Sabbath morning" with his "living Scotch" sounding in our ears. However far away Louis Stevenson roved, there was mirrored on the tablets of his memory his own country, its speech, its very atmosphere. He wrote a New Arabian Nights, but from the old (he tells us how his minister grandfather envied him his first reading thereof) he had acquired the secret of the magic carpet, and could be transported at will from the tropics back to where the curlews and the plovers wailed and swooped above the whins and the heather on his hills of sheep.

STEVENSON'S APPRENTICESHIP
In his early days, Louis was sociable, pleased when he met compatriot children, ready to be dressed and go to parties. But after he left school, his mood changed. He had been completely sheltered from rebuffs, so, when he stood in the "palace porch of life," and the peculiar accents of his mind were jeered at, he, who had never tasted of a whipping, felt the smart of humankind, and suffered sorely from "maladies incident to only sons." In the "coiled perplexities of youth" he "sorrowed, sobbed, and feared" alone. Blackford's uncultured breast had been meet nurse for Sir Walter when he roamed a truant boy, but further south of the becastled capital, topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton became the cradle of the next poet and master of Romance that Edinburgh reared. There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man to ring them. When Swanston