indomitable will." The Sheriff, in this letter to me, recalls
several reminiscences of Stevenson-some in a playful or contrariwise
vein, and another memory illustrates, he says, "the sweet
reasonableness which mingled with his wayward Bohemianism"; but
space does not allow me to quote more than how, "It seems but
yesterday that I met Louis in the Parliament House, and said I heard
he had got a case. And I seem to see the twinkle in his eye and the
toss of his arms as he answered, 'Yes, my boy, you'll see how I'll
stick in, now that I've tasted blood.'"

Louis' mother showed this friend, Mr. Guthrie, a succession of her
boy's photographs, ending in wig and gown as an advocate. "That is
what I call from Baby to Bar," she said; and then added, beginning
with a smile, and ending with a break in her voice, "I said to Louis
once that the next collection would be from Bar to Baronet, and he
replied, 'It will be from Bar to Burial.'" Except at the "dear old
Spec.," he mixed little his equals in Edinburgh. As a writer in
Blackwood points out, at the period he had grown into swallow-tails,
Edinburgh was by no means devoid of intellectual company, which even
a famed Robert Louis need not have despised. But he abhorred
constraint and codes of rules. He was a born adventurer and
practical experimentist in life, and he explains he spent much of
his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and
womenkind. His insatiable curiosity made him thirst to taste of the
bitter as well as the sweet, to be pricked by the thorn as well as
smell the rose. He was quick to see the humorous side of a tale or
episode, but he was tenderly sensitive to ridicule. When he appeared
among his legal brothers-in-law in the Parliament House, a wit there
among the unemployed advocates in the old hall called him the Gifted
Boy. He winced under the laugh, and fled from "the interminable
patter of legal feet." He had cultivated notoriety by his shabby
dress and lank locks. He did not realise, as an American says, "If
you look as if you had slept in your clothes most men will jump to
the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them
well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts
that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your
shoulders." In a corridor in the Parliament House, where the men
called to the Bar keep open-mouthed boxes for documents to be
slipped in, one bore on its plate the inscription R. L. Stev