o let him go down in the diver's dress.
He gave us a splendid description--finer, I think, than even that in his
_Memories_--of his sensations on the sea-bottom, which seems to have
interested him as deeply, and suggested as many strange fancies, as
anything which he ever came across on the surface. But the possibility
of enterprises of this sort ended--Stevenson lost his interest in
engineering.

{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p20.jpg}

Stevenson's father had, indeed, been much exercised in his day by
theological questions and difficulties, and though he remained a staunch
adherent of the Established Church of Scotland he knew well and
practically what is meant by the term "accommodation," as it is used by
theologians in reference to creeds and formulas; for he had over and over
again, because of the strict character of the subscription required from
elders of the Scottish Church declined, as I have said, to accept the
office. In a very express sense you could see that he bore the marks of
his past in many ways--a quick, sensitive, in some ways even a fantastic-
minded man, yet with a strange solidity and common-sense amid it all,
just as though ferns with the veritable fairies' seed were to grow out of
a common stone wall. He looked like a man who had not been without
sleepless nights--without troubles, sorrows, and perplexities, and even
yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or the results of them. His
voice was "low and sweet"--with just a possibility in it of rising to a
shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely
through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and
fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic
pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it. He was most frank
and genial with me, and I greatly honour his memory. {2}

Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a
disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always
called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow up
his profession at the Scottish Bar. How much he had looked forward,
after the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting himself to the work
of the Parliament House (as the Hall of the Chief Court is called in
Scotland, from the building having been while yet there was a Scottish
Parliament the place where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling
how much Stevenson's very air and figure would