The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls | Page 4

were in all parts
of the world guiding the mariners."
CHAPTER II
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"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 No. 8 Howard Place,
Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850.
In 1852 the family moved from Howard Place to Inverleith Terrace,
and two years later to No. 17 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.
[Illustration: No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace]
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