imself--was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something
of an _idler_, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply. He
was applying them rightly, though not in their way. It is not only in
his _Apology for Idlers_ that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as
in his essay on _A College Magazine_, where he says, "I was always busy
on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two
books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!"

When he went to College it was still the same--he tells us in the
funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of
Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned "his face was not familiar
to him"! He fared very differently when, afterwards his father, eager
that he should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil
engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin. He still stuck to his
old courses--wandering about, and, in sheltered corners, writing in the
open air, and was not present in class more than a dozen times. When the
session was ended he went up to try for a certificate from Fleeming
Jenkin. "No, no, Mr Stevenson," said the Professor; "I might give it in
a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you have not kept my
classes." And the most characteristic thing--honourable to both men--is
to come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and
strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man's sketch of the
elder. He learned from Professor Fleeming Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously,
more of the _humaniores_, than consciously he did of engineering. A
friend of mine, who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours,
to which R. L. Stevenson's mother belonged, recalls, as we have seen, his
acting in the private theatricals that were got up by the Professor, and
adds, "He was then a very handsome fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir
Charles Pomander, and essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter
Teazle," which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such
parts splendidly as well as looked them.

_Longman's Magazine_, immediately after his death, published the
following poem, which took a very pathetic touch from the circumstances
of its appearance--the more that, while it imaginatively and finely
commemorated these days of truant wanderings, it showed the ruling
passion for home and the old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not
unnigh to death:

"The tropics