outed the
slogan of the Elliots": perhaps "And wha dares meddle wi' me!" In "Weir
of Hermiston" he returns to "the auld bauld Elliots" with zest. He was
not, perhaps, aware that, through some remote ancestress on the spindle
side, he "came of Harden's line," so that he and I had a common forebear
with Sir Walter Scott, and were hundredth cousins of each other, if we
reckon in the primitive manner by female descent. Of these Border
ancestors, Louis inherited the courage; he was a fearless person, but
one would not trace his genius to "The Bard of Rule," an Elliot named
"Sweet Milk" who was slain in a duel by another minstrel, about 1627.

Genius is untraceable; the granite intellect of Louis's great
engineering forefathers, the Stevensons, was not, like his, tuneful:
though his father was imaginative, diverting himself with daydreams; and
his uncle, Alan Stevenson, the builder of Skerryvore, yielded to the
fascinations of the religious Muse. A volume of verse was the pledge of
this dalliance. His mother, who gave him her gay indifference to
discomfort and readiness for travel, also read to him, in his childhood,
much good literature; for not till he was eight years of age was he an
unreluctant reader--which is strange. The whole record of his life, from
his eighteenth month, is a chronicle of fever and ill-health, borne
always with heroic fortitude. His dear nurse, Alison Cunningham, seems
to have been a kind of festive Cameronian. Her recitation of hymns was,
though she hated "the playhouse," "grand and dramatic." There is a hymn,
"Jehovah Tsidkenu," in which he rejoiced; and no wonder, for the refrain
"Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me," moves with the galloping
hoof-beats of

"'Tis up wi' the bonnets o' Bonny Dundee!"

I have, however, ascertained that this theological piece is not sung to
the tune, "The cavalry canter of Bonny Dundee." When the experiment is
made, the results are unspeakably strange.

It need not be said, Stevenson has told us in verse and prose, that in
childhood "his whole vocation was endless imitation." He was the hunter
and the pirate and the king--throwing his fancy very seriously into each
of his _roles_, though visualizing never passed with him, as with some
children it does, into actual hallucination. He had none of the
invisible playmates that, to some children, are visible and real. He was
less successful than Shelley in seeing apparitions: but the dreams which
he communicated to