Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 9

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
'To bed with backward looks, At my dear world of story books.'
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.
CHAPTER III
BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS
'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' --LONGFELLOW.
... 'Strange enchantments from the past And memories of the friends of old, And strong tradition binding fast The "flying terms" with bands of gold.' --ANDREW LANG.
The years 1861 and 1862 found Louis, with his childhood left behind him, a boy among other boys who sat on the forms and who played in the yards of the Academy, at which, during the greater part of the present century, many of the sons of Edinburgh men, and indeed of Scotsmen everywhere at home and abroad, have received their education.
From 1864 to 1867 he was principally at a Mr Thompson's school in Frederick Street, and he studied from time to time with private tutors at the different places to which his parents went for the benefit of their own health or his. These rather uncommon educational experiences were of far more value to him in after life than a steady attendance at any one school, as they made him an excellent linguist and gave him, from very youthful years, a wide knowledge of foreign life and foreign manners. In 1862 the Stevenson family visited Holland and Germany, in 1863 they were in Italy, in 1864 in the Riviera, and at Torquay for some months during the winter of 1865 and 1866; but after 1867 the family life became more settled and was chiefly passed between Edinburgh and Swanston.
In those days Louis was a lean, slim lad, inclined to be tall, and with soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to deepen and change with every passing impression of his quick working brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his father's powerful physiognomy.
He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true, voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable classical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was an historical student after a fashion of his own, dipping deep into such books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited form, and resolved itself