the
paternal mansion of Heriot Row. The genie might have transported him to
a German University, perhaps to Heidelberg.

_Dis aliter visum_, and the result, for us, is his matchless book on
Edinburgh. To see a copy thereof is to take it up, and read through it
again; it is better at every reading.

In 1871 he broke to his father the news that the profession of
engineering was not for him. The Scottish Bar (1874-1875) was not more
attractive, and in 1873 his meeting with Mr. (now Sir) Sidney Colvin
(then Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, and already well known
as a critic), and with a lady, Mrs. Sitwell, to whom many of his most
carefully written early letters are addressed, probably sealed Stevenson
into the profession of literature.

He has left this note on his prospects:

I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my
future life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year; a
very quiet, desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me
tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy; work and
science calm the mind and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am
glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great
man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey; not without
hope of coming to the inn before nightfall.

O dass mein Leben
Nach diesem Ziel ein ewig Wandeln sey!

DESIDERATA

I. Good Health
II. 2 to 3 hundred a year
III. O du lieber Gott, _friends_!
AMEN

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

He wrote an article, this born wayfarer, on "Roads," which was accepted
by P. G. Hamerton for the "Portfolio," but in November, 1873, "nervous
exhaustion, with a threatening of phthisis," caused him to be "Ordered
South" to Mentone--a lonely exile. Here he was joined by Mr. Colvin, and
in Mr. Colvin's rooms, for I also was "ordered South," I first met this
surprising figure. Our schooldays had just overlapped; he was a "gyte"
(a child in the lowest form; "class" we called it), when I was in the
highest, but I had never seen him, nor heard of him.

In some rhymes of his later years, when Count Nerli was painting his
portrait, Louis wrote:

"Oh, will he paint me the way I like, and as bonny as a girlie,
Or will he make me an ugly tyke; and be d---- to Mr. Nerli?"

When first we met, he really was "as bonny as