The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls | Page 6

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?"
[Illustration: Colinton Manse]
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