don. Life at a boarding school was misery
to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis,
and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In _Random
Memories_ he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his
belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is
so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of
leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful
suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is
taken. It was, he says, this miserable feeling of suspense that made
him share his sorrows with a desolate, but amiable cat in the Easter
Road, which mingled its woes with his and as it purred against him
consoled him.

His tender-hearted parents were so touched by his evident affliction,
and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a
trip round the coast of Fife in _The Pharos_ and he thus made an early
and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights and harbours which
his father had gone to inspect.

Although the cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, who had been his
schoolfellow in Edinburgh, and two of his younger brothers were day
pupils at the Spring Grove School, and his aunt, Miss Balfour, was
living near, he became very homesick and unhappy, and the regular school
work, with its impositions and punishments, fretted him and made him so
ill, that in December his father, who had been at Mentone with his
mother, hastily returned and took him away from school. It was too late,
however, the few months had been too great a trial for his health, and
he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed some
very bracing treatment of which the youthful patient highly disapproved.

Of the home where so much consideration was shown to a child's health
and feelings, no better description can be given than the graphic one of
a little Stevenson cousin who had gone with his parents to stay there,
and who thus spoke of it: 'A child who never cries, a nurse who is never
cross, and late dinners.'

Can one imagine a dignified, childish paradise that could go much
further! Nor were the joys of books awanting to the happy small boy who
describes himself as in early days being carried off by his nurse

'To bed with backward looks,
At my dear world of story books.'

As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous
reader, and could