fact, fiction, and fun, and
another _The School Boy Magazine_. The latter contained four stories and
its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their
fill of horrors--"regular crawlers," Louis called them. In the first
tale, "The Adventures of Jan Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a
boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is a "Ghost Story" of
robbers in a deserted castle.... The third is called, "by curious
anticipation of a story he was to write later on, 'The Wreckers.'"

Numerous plays and novels he began but they eventually found their fate
in the trash basket. An exception to this was a small green pamphlet of
twenty pages called "The Pentland Rising, a page of history, 1666." It
was published through his father's interest on the two-hundredth
anniversary of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in Scotland's
history had been impressed on his mind by the numerous stories. Cummie
had told him of the Covenanters and the fact that they had spent the
night before their defeat in the town of Colinton.

From the time he was a little chap, balancing on the limb of an
apple-tree in the Colinton garden trying to see what kind of a world
lay beyond the garden wall, Louis had had a longing to travel and see
sights. This began to find satisfaction now.

His father took him on a trip around the coast of Fife, visiting the
harbor lights. The little towns along the coast were already familiar to
him by the stories of the past. Dunfermline, where, according to the
ballad, Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drinking blood-red wine";
Kerkcaldy, where the witches used to sink "tall ships and honest
mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden passed a night
of superstitious terrors."

Later the family made a trip to the English Lakes and in the winter of
the same year to the south of France, where they stayed two months, then
making a tour through Italy and Switzerland. The following Christmas
found Louis and his mother again in Mentone, where they stayed until
spring.

French was one of his favorite studies at school, and now after a few
months among French people he was able to speak fluently. Indeed, in
after life he was often mistaken for a Frenchman.

His French teacher on his second visit to Mentone gave him no regular
lessons, but "merely talked to him in French, teaching him piquet and
card tricks, int