The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls | Page 8

none
could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like a polecat, by the smell.
"The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night,
the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping whether to
conduct your footsteps or make your glory public, a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark, and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt and exult
and sing over the knowledge."
In later years one of the Lantern Bearers describes Louis as he was then.
"A slender, long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, with an
undescribable influence that forced us to include him in our play as a
looker on, critic and slave driver.... No one had the remotest intention
of competing with R.L.S. in story making, and his tales, had we known
it, were such as the world would listen to in silence and wonder."
At home and at his last school he was always starting magazines. The
stories were illustrated with much color and the magazines circulated
among the boys for a penny a reading. One was called The Sunbeam
Magazine, an illustrated miscellany of fact, fiction, and fun, and
another The School Boy Magazine. The latter contained four stories and
its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their fill
of horrors--"regular crawlers," Louis called them. In the first tale, "The
Adventures of Jan Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a boiler under
which a fire is lit. The second is a "Ghost Story" of robbers in a
deserted castle.... The third is called, "by curious anticipation of a story
he was to write later on, 'The Wreckers.'"
Numerous plays and novels he began but they eventually found their
fate in the trash basket. An exception to this was a small green
pamphlet of twenty pages called "The Pentland Rising, a page of
history, 1666." It was published through his father's interest on the
two-hundredth anniversary of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in
Scotland's history had been impressed on his mind by the numerous
stories. Cummie had told him of the Covenanters and the fact that they

had spent the night before their defeat in the town of Colinton.
From the time he was a little chap, balancing on the limb of an
apple-tree in the Colinton garden trying to see what kind of a world lay
beyond the garden wall, Louis had had a longing to travel and see
sights. This began to find satisfaction now.
His father took him on a trip around the coast of Fife, visiting the
harbor lights. The little towns along the coast were already familiar to
him by the stories of the past. Dunfermline, where, according to the
ballad, Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drinking blood-red wine";
Kerkcaldy, where the witches used to sink "tall ships and honest
mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden passed a
night of superstitious terrors."
Later the family made a trip to the English Lakes and in the winter of
the same year to the south of France, where they stayed two months,
then making a tour through Italy and Switzerland. The following
Christmas found Louis and his mother again in Mentone, where they
stayed until spring.
French was one of his favorite studies at school, and now after a few
months among French people he was able to speak fluently. Indeed, in
after life he was often mistaken for a Frenchman.
His French teacher on his second visit to Mentone gave him no regular
lessons, but "merely talked to him in French, teaching him piquet and
card tricks, introducing him to various French people and taking him to
concerts and other places; so, his mother remarks, like Louis' other
teachers at home I think they found it pleasanter to talk to him then to
teach him."
After their return to Edinburgh came the time when, his school days
finished, Louis must make up his mind what his career is to be and
train himself for it.
Even then he knew what he wanted to do was to write. He had fitted up

a room on the top floor at Heriot Row as a study and spent hours there
covering paper with stories or trying to describe in the very best way
scenes which had impressed him. Most of these were discarded when
finished. "I liked doing them indeed," he said, "but when done I could
see they were rubbish." He never doubted, however, that some day his
attempts would prove worth while, if he could only devote his time to
learning to write and write well.
His