for the family profession. In 1868, the year when the
following correspondence opens, he went to watch the works of the firm
in progress first at Anstruther on the coast of Fife, and afterwards at
Wick. In 1869 he made the tour of the Orkneys and Shetlands on board the
steam yacht of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, and in 1870 the
tour of the Western Islands, preceded by a stay on the isle of Earraid,
where the works of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse were then in progress. He
was a favourite, although a very irregular, pupil of the professor of
engineering, Fleeming Jenkin, whose friendship and that of Mrs. Jenkin
were of great value to him, and whose life he afterwards wrote; and must
have shown some aptitude for the family calling, inasmuch as in 1871 he
received the silver medal of the Edinburgh Society of Arts for a paper
on a suggested improvement in lighthouse apparatus. The outdoor and
seafaring parts of an engineer's life were in fact wholly to his taste.
But he looked instinctively at the powers and phenomena of waves and
tide, of storm and current, reef, cliff, and rock, with the eye of the
poet and artist, and not those of the practician and calculator. For
desk work and office routine he had an unconquerable aversion; and his
physical powers, had they remained at their best, must have proved quite
unequal to the workshop training necessary to the practical engineer.
Accordingly in 1871 it was agreed, not without natural reluctance on his
father's part, that he should give up the hereditary vocation and read
for the bar: literature, on which his heart was set, and in which his
early attempts had been encouraged, being held to be by itself no
profession, or at least one altogether too irregular and undefined. For
the next several years, therefore, he attended law classes instead of
engineering and science classes in the University, giving to the subject
a certain amount of serious, although fitful, attention until he was
called to the bar in 1875.

So much for the course of Stevenson's outward life during these days at
Edinburgh. To tell the story of his inner life would be a far more
complicated task, and cannot here be attempted even briefly. The ferment
of youth was more acute and more prolonged in him than in most men even
of genius. In the Introduction I have tried to give some notion of the
many various strains and elements which met in him, and which were in
these days pulling one against another in h