hich gradually disappeared bit by
bit.

In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the
watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a
real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the
Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles
southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. Not only was there
the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of
mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age
sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated
under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote:

"Chief of our aunts--not only I,
But all the dozen nurslings cry--
What did the other children do?
And what was childhood, wanting you?"

[Illustration: Colinton Manse]

If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty
in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson,
Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at
Colinton.

Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We children admired him, partly for
his beautiful face and silver hair ... partly for the solemn light in
which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers in the
pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old
age, slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us with a kind of terror.
When not abroad, he sat much alone writing sermons or letters to his
scattered family.... The study had a redeeming grace in many Indian
pictures gaudily colored and dear to young eyes.... When I was once sent
in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear,
but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might
reward me with an Indian picture."

"There were two ways of entering the Manse garden," he says, "one the
two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton and the other a door for
pedestrians on the side next the kirk.... On the left hand were the
stables, coach-houses and washing houses, clustered around a small,
paved court.... Once past the stable you were fairly within the garden.
On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally _steeped_ in
sunshine....

"The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a
level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from
the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat
d