the Heart_,
and the even more popular _The Senile Heart_. About the latter he tells
an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying
on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique
title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a
learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse,
wrote papers in _The Indian Annals_ and _The Edinburgh Medical Journal_,
which were very highly esteemed.

In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith
Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people.
Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of
the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin--a
son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably
on medical and other subjects--has already gained for herself no
inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, _The Fall of the
Sparrow_, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable
books of last year.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which
appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been
developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still
a careless student of twenty, his papers in _The Edinburgh University
Magazine_ possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured
minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.

_An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_ especially had much of the depth of
thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr
Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a
story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes
them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most
brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to
face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay
reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the
flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you,
or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in _The Old Manse_ and
_Random Memories_ see familiar places and people touched by the light of
genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as
to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them,
hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and
th