ed, and had a job for the
evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and
up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my
flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it,
and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves
into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their
individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the
springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over
his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our
violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a
good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up
at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice,
Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my
clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the
pipe."

But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at
one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the
Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in
1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make
the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would
correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I
have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a
tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to
have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed
to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's
Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could
not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he
tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he
thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed
that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or
"a sheaf of 'em."

But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand
at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical
notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully's. About the harmony,
which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. "Where I
have put an A," he says, "is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a
seventh on the D? and if