ready to be dressed and go to parties. But
after he left school, his mood changed. He had been completely
sheltered from rebuffs, so, when he stood in the "palace porch of
life," and the peculiar accents of his mind were jeered at, he, who
had never tasted of a whipping, felt the smart of humankind, and
suffered sorely from "maladies incident to only sons." In the
"coiled perplexities of youth" he "sorrowed, sobbed, and feared"
alone. Blackford's uncultured breast had been meet nurse for Sir
Walter when he roamed a truant boy, but further south of the
becastled capital, topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton became the
cradle of the next poet and master of Romance that Edinburgh reared.
There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is
the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man
to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the
undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he
called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the
bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability." He was loudly
rebellious, and too impatient to follow the ordinary rules of life
or the sage advice, "Jowk and let the jaw gae by."

An impression has arisen, because of his revolt in these years
against convention and creeds, that he was thwarted and
unappreciated in his home and its surroundings. On the contrary, he
was at liberty to indulge his Bohemian tastes and do much as he
listed. His father gave him a seemingly inadequate allowance. Yet
Thomas Stevenson was not a miserly man. He begged his son to go to
his tailor's, for he disapproved of the youth's scuffy, mounte-bankish
appearance. He supplied him with an allowance for travel--in
fact, R. L. S. had all his bills paid, and his own study in a very
hospitable home. R, L. S. owned books, and jewels were the only
things he felt tempted to buy. The 1 pound a month allowance, when
he left school, raised soon after to 82 pounds a year, was to keep
the money from dropping out of that hole in the pocket of his ragged
jacket, which never seemed to get sewed up. Books he had in plenty,
but his parents naturally did not treat him to strings of flashing
stones to wear over his shabby velvet coat, or twine round his
battered straw hat. His money affairs, like the table of Weir of
Hermiston, were likely all his life "just mismanaged." By the time
he settled in Samoa, his literary earnings were thousands a year