, and so he sought the haunts of
"thieves and chimney sweeps!" he says, and wrote sonnets in those shy
retreats, which are known, perhaps, in Scotland, as "shebeens." Why
"shebeens"? Is the word Gaelic misspelled? Cases of "shebeening" are
tried before the Edinburgh magistrates, and as "my circle was being
continually changed by the action of the police magistrates" (he says)
conceivably his was a shebeening circle.

Another lad of his age, some eighty years earlier, was partial, like
him, to taverns and old clothes. "They be good enough for drinking in,"
said Walter Scott, when Erskine, or some other friend, ventured to
remonstrate. Scott, like Stevenson, knew queer people, knew beggars--but
had not one of them shaken hands with Prince Charles? Certainly, after
Scott met Green Mantle, and sheltered her, as she came from church,
under his umbrella (a piece of furniture which Stevenson can never have
possessed), he left off his old clothes, and went into the best company.
But R. L. S. did not delight in the good company of his native town; nor
did he suffer gladly the conventional raiment of the evening hours.
Green Mantle there was none, as far as we learn. He was not popular with
the young Scots of his age, his biographer says so candidly; candidly
have they said as much to me, yet they were good fellows.

From childhood he had enjoyed all the indulgences of an only son, and an
invalid; now he was "brought up short," and there were the religious
disputes with a sire to whom he was devoted. The climate of his own
romantic town (the worst in the world) was his foe; the wandering spirit
in his blood called him to the south and the sun; he tells of months in
which he had no mortal to whom he could speak freely, his cousin Bob
being absent; he was unhappy; he was out of his _milieu_.

What would the genie have done for him? Neither of the English
Universities would have been to his taste; the rebel in him would have
kicked at morning chapel, lectures, cap and gown, Proctors, the talk of
"oars" and "bats"; manifestly Balliol was not the place for R. L. S.,
though he might have been happy with his contemporary John Churton
Collins. He, I remember--even to the velvet coat--was like Stevenson,
and was a rebel. Grant Allen, too, would have been his contemporary--the
only man in Oxford who took to Herbert Spencer, whom Stevenson also read
with much edification.

Yet it is clear that Stevenson should not have been domiciled in