there at the same
time; but, he explains, the future Tusitala,--"the lover of
children, the teller of tales, giver of counsel, and dreams, a
wonder, a world's delight,"--and he did not meet there, for Louis
was "but a little whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some
lower class," when his future brother author was "an elderly boy of
seventeen." The pity was that the cosseted only son never rubbed
against his compatriot children in the discipline of the play-fields,
but in some of his summer holidays he tasted of the doubtful
pleasures of lantern-bearing and other boyish "glories of
existence."

When the lad was seventeen, his parents leased Swanston Cottage,
which became their summer home, and a big factor in their boy's
education. It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and
sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered
"frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there
Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master
Stylist--the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These
Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes
to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his
grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey
houses, looked for their familiar outline when winter prisoned him
in Auld Reekie.

These pastoral hills, with their sweeps of heathy moorlands, appear
from first to last in his works. Two of his initial Memories and
Portraits depict his hill-folk neighbors, the Shepherd and the
Gardener. It was at a church "atween the muckle Pentland's knees"
that Archie Weir of Hermiston noted young Kirsty, and that same
"little cruciform place" was the scene of his "PETIT POEME EN
PROSE," where we can all spend a peaceful "Lowden Sabbath morning"
with his "living Scotch" sounding in our ears. However far away
Louis Stevenson roved, there was mirrored on the tablets of his
memory his own country, its speech, its very atmosphere. He wrote a
New Arabian Nights, but from the old (he tells us how his minister
grandfather envied him his first reading thereof) he had acquired
the secret of the magic carpet, and could be transported at will
from the tropics back to where the curlews and the plovers wailed
and swooped above the whins and the heather on his hills of sheep.

STEVENSON'S APPRENTICESHIP

In his early days, Louis was sociable, pleased when he met
compatriot children,