ound none of them gathers so much of romance of honour and of
distinction as about Robert Louis Stevenson, who used to visit his
uncle's house in Leven, doubtless from one of those expeditions to
Anstruther, of which he tells us that he spent his time by day in giving
a perfunctory attention to the harbour, at which his father's firm were
working, and lived his real life by night scribbling romances in his
lodgings. It is on record that he felt a thrill of well-merited pride
when an Anstruther small boy pointed to him, as he stood beside the
workmen, and said: 'There's the man that's takin' charge.' But he
assuredly knew more of pleasure in his hours of scribbling than in his
hours of inspection, although the out-of-door, wind-swept, wave-splashed
part of engineering was never so abhorrent to him as office work. In the
office he was known very little; but tradition has it that a small pile
of evil spellings is still treasured there as a characteristic memento
of the genius, and the thought has been known to comfort the sad hearts
of other apprentice engineers afflicted with a like shakiness in their
orthography, that the now much appreciated man of letters once shared
their melancholy failing.

Stories of all sorts were handed about in our little clique of the
wondrous Robert Louis whose sayings and doings were already precious to
an appreciative circle of relatives and friends. But it was not till
sometime in the autumn of 1869 that he first became personally known to
me.

The introduction took place on a September afternoon in the drawing-room
of 'The Turret,' and he inspired a great deal of awe in a youthful
admirer who even then had literary aspirations, and who therefore looked
up to him with much respect as someone who already wrote. From that time
he was regarded as one of the quaintest, the most original and the most
charming personalities among one's acquaintances. There was about him,
in those days, a whimsical affectation, a touch of purely delightful
vanity that never wholly left him in later life, and that far from
repelling, as it would have done in any one more commonplace, was so
intrinsically a part of his artistic nature that it was rather
attractive than otherwise. Full of delightful humour, his idlest
sayings--when he took the trouble to say anything which he frequently
did not!--were teeming with the elements not only of laughter but of
thought, and you wondered, long after you had talked with him,