“As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the window of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.”

“Child’s Garden of Verses.”

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born at N Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850.

In 1852 the family moved from Howard Place to Inverleith Terrace, and two years later to N Heriot Row, which remained their home for many years.

As a child Louis was very delicate and often ill, for years hardly a winter passed that he did not spend many days in bed.

Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp and he tells us: “Many winters I never crossed the threshold, but used to lie on my face on the nursery floor, chalking or painting in water-colors the pictures in the illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed with a little shawl pinned about my shoulders, to play with bricks or what not.”

The diverting history of “Hop-O’-My-Thumb” and the “Seven-League Boots,” “Little Arthur’s History of England,” “Peter Parley’s Historical Tales,” and “Harry’s Ladder to Learning” were books which he delighted to pore over and their pages bore many traces of his skill with the pencil and paint-brush.

Those who have read the “Child’s Garden of Verses” already know the doings of his childish days, for although those rhymes were not written until he was a grown man he was “one of the few who do not forget their own lives” and “through the windows of this book” gives us a vivid and living picture of the boy who dwelt so much in a world of his own with his quaint thoughts.

If his body was frail his spirit was strong and his power of imagination so great that he cheered himself through many a weary day by playing he was “captain of a tidy little ship,” a soldier, a fierce pirate, an Indian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. Miles he travelled in his little bed.

“I have just to shut my eyes,
To go sailing through the skies
To go sailing far away
To the pleasant Land of Play”

he says.

In spite of his power for amusing himself, days like these would have gone far harder had it not been for two devoted people, his mother and his nurse, Alison Cunningham or “Cummie” as he called her. His mother was devoted to him in every way and encouraged his love for reading and story-making. She kept a diary of his progress from day to day, and treasured every picture he drew or scrap he wrote. Cummie came to him as a Torryburn lassie when he was eighteen months old and was like a second mother to him. She not only cared for his bodily comforts but was his friend and comrade as well. She sang for him, danced for him, spun fine tales of pirates and smugglers, and read to him so dramatically that his mind was fired then and there with a longing for travel and adventure which he never lost. When they took their walks through the streets together Cummie had many stories to tell him of Scotland and Edinburgh in the old days. For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with a wonderful history full of tales of stirring adventure and romance. “For centuries it was a capitol thatched with heather and more than once, in the evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, a beacon to ships at sea.... It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on Greenside or by the King’s Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords.... In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows’ nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat James VI. would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day and night ’with tearful psalms.’... In the Grassmarket, stiff-necked covenanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, but not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon and stars and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of the drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses’ tails a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at their head who was to return in a different temper, make a bold dash that staggered Scotland, and die happily in the thick of the fight....

“The palace of Holyrood is a house of many memories.... Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom levees and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours....

“There is an old story of the subterranean passage between the castle and Holyrood and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey; the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt, but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stands beside St. Giles, when they hear the crone of his pipes reascending from the earth below their horses’ feet.”

In Edinburgh to-day there are armed men and cannon in the castle high up on the great rock above you: “You may see the troops marshalled on the high parade, and at night after the early winter evenfall and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sounds of drums and bugles.” (Stevenson, “Essay on Edinburgh.”)

Long before Louis could write he made up verses and stories for himself, and Cummie wrote them down for him. “I thought they were rare nonsense then,” she said, little dreaming that these same bits of “rare nonsense” were the beginnings of what was to make “her boy” famous across two seas in years to come.

He writes of her when speaking of long nights he lay awake unable to sleep because of a troublesome cough: “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 garden, where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.”

Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life. One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the Juvenilia was called “Nurses.” Fifteen years later came the publication of the “Child’s Garden of Verses” with a splendid tribute to her as a dedication. He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters to her, and invited her to visit him. She herself tells that the last time she ever saw him he said to her, “before a room full of people, ‘It’s you that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,’ ’Me, Master Lou,’ I said, ‘I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.’ ’Ay, woman,’ said he, ’but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.’”

When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.

This was Louis’s first real literary attempt. He was not able to write himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.

He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, “it was the desire of his heart to be an author.”

During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, usually called Bob, visited them; a great treat for Louis, not only because his ill health kept him from making many companions of his own age, but because Bob loved many of the same things he did and to “make believe” was as much a part of his life as Louis’s. Many fine games they had together; built toy theatres, the scenery and characters for which they bought for a “penny plain and twopence colored,” and were never tired of dressing up. One of their chief delights, he says, was in “rival kingdoms of our own invention Nosingtonia and Encyclopædia, of which we were perpetually drawing maps.” Even the eating of porridge at breakfast became a game. Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while Louis’s was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by bit.

In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. Not only was there the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote:

“Chief of our aunts not only I,
But all the dozen nurslings cry
What did the other children do?
And what was childhood, wanting you?”

If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson, Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at Colinton.

Of his grandfather Balfour he says: “We children admired him, partly for his beautiful face and silver hair ... partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone writing sermons or letters to his scattered family.... The study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures gaudily colored and dear to young eyes.... When I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture.”

“There were two ways of entering the Manse garden,” he says, “one the two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton and the other a door for pedestrians on the side next the kirk.... On the left hand were the stables, coach-houses and washing houses, clustered around a small, paved court.... Once past the stable you were fairly within the garden. On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally steeped in sunshine....

“The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden, and called the ‘witches’ walk’ from a game we used to play in it.... Even out of the ‘witches’ walk’ you saw the Manse facing toward you, with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on each side of it; flower plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious belief, namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any footprints that he saw, to compare the measurement at night with the boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a strategic movement of the foot to make the mark longer....

“So much for the garden; now follow me into the house. On entering the door you had before you a stone paved lobby.... There stood a case of foreign birds, two or three marble deities from India and a lily of the Nile in a pot, and at the far end the stairs shut in the view. With how many games of ‘tig’ or brick-building in the forenoon is the long low dining room connected in my mind! The storeroom was a most voluptuous place, with its piles of biscuit boxes and spice tins, the rack for buttered eggs, the little window that let in the sunshine and the flickering shadows of leaves, and the strong sweet odor of everything that pleaseth the taste of men....

“Opposite the study was the parlor, a small room crammed full of furniture and covered with portraits, with a cabinet at the side full of foreign curiosities, and a sort of anatomical trophy on the top. During a grand cleaning of the apartment I remember all the furniture was ranged on a circular grass plot between the churchyard and the house. It was a lovely still summer evening, and I stayed out, climbing among the chairs and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, I asked what it was. Part of an albatross, auntie told me. ‘What is an albatross?’ I asked, and then she described to me this great bird nearly as big as a house, that you saw out miles away from any land, sleeping above the vast and desolate ocean. She told me that the Ancient Mariner was all about one; and quoted with great verve (she had a duster in her hand, I recollect)

’With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.’

... Willie had a crossbow, but up to this date I had never envied him its possession. After this, however, it became one of the objects of my life.”

With many playmates, free to roam and romp as he chose, his illness forgotten, it is no wonder he says he felt as if he led two lives, one belonging to Edinburgh and one to the country, and that Colinton ever remained an enchanted spot to which it was always hard to say good-by.