Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 4

so sweetly in his
Child's Garden of Verses--
'Chief of our Aunts not only I But all your other nurslings cry, What
did the other children do? And what were childhood wanting you?'
To other 'motherless bairns,' as well as to her own brothers and sisters,
nephews and nieces, that most motherly heart and gentle and beautiful
soul has been a comfort and a refuge on the thorny highway of life, and
many whose love she has earned by the tenderness of her sympathy still
call Miss Balfour blessed.
She was a true helper to her father in the motherless home and in his
parish work, and in spite of much bad health filled the mother's place in
the house and won for herself the undying affection and regard not only
of her own family but of her father's parishioners and friends.

A testimony to the high esteem in which her father's memory and hers,
and indeed that of all the Balfour family, is still held in Colinton, was
given to me a few years ago by the old beadle there. Fond as he was of
Dr Lockhart, to speak to him of the Balfours, whom he remembered in
his younger days, at once won his attention and regard. On my saying
to him it was for their sakes I wished to see the inside of the church he
queried with a brightening face:
'Ye'll no be ane o' them, will ye?'
'No' was the reply, 'but they have been so long known and loved they
seem like my "ain folk" to me.'
'Aweel come awa' an' see the kirk. Will ye mind o' him?'
Alas! no; for the minister of Colinton had died seven years before my
friendship with the Balfours began.
'Eh!' was all the old man said, but that and the shake of his head
eloquently expressed what a loss that was for me!
'But ye'll ken her?' meaning Miss Balfour, he queried again, and as I
said I did and well, the face brightened with a great brightness.
So, having found a friend in common, together we went over the
church and the manse grounds, but, as Dr Lockhart was away from
home, I resisted his persuasion to ask leave to go through the house and
contented myself with a pleasant talk with him of Dr John Balfour, who
had fought the mutineers in India and the cholera at Davidson's Mains,
Slateford, and Leven; of Dr George, who is still fighting the ills that
flesh is heir to, in Edinburgh; of the sons and daughters of the manse
who had gone to their rest; of Mrs Stevenson, then in Samoa with her
son, and whose charm of personality made her dear to the old man, and
lastly of 'the clivir lad,' her son, who had spent such happy days in the
old manse garden.
Of all the children in that large family Maggie, the youngest, was
perhaps especially her sister's charge; and one knows, from that elder

sister's description, how sweet, and good, and bright the little girl was,
and how charming was the face, and how loving the heart of the mother
of Robert Louis Stevenson when she too was a child at play in the
manse garden. The mother's beauty and that dainty refinement of face
and voice which she bequeathed to her son came to her in a long and
honourable descent from a family that had for many centuries been
noted for the beauty and the sincere goodness of its women, for the
godliness and the manliness of its men.
The Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour of Colinton was the third son of Mr Balfour,
the Laird of Pilrig. The quaint old house of Pilrig stands a little back
from Leith Walk, the date on it is 1638; and the text inscribed on its
door-stone, 'For we know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle
were dissolved we have a building of God, an house not made with
hands eternal in the heavens,' is a fitting motto for a race whose first
prominent ancestor was that James Balfour of Reformation times, who
not only was a cousin of Melville the Reformer, but who married one
of the Melville family. This double tie to those so entwined with the
very life of that great period in Scotland's history brought Mr James
Balfour into very close communion with such men as Erskine of Dun,
the Rev. John Durie, and many others of the Reforming ministers and
gentlemen, with whom a member of the Pilrig family, the late James
Balfour-Melville, Esq., W.S., in his interesting pamphlet dealing with
his family says, that his ancestor had much godly conversation and
communing.
The early promise of the race was not belied in its later descendants,
and the Balfours were