During the Crimean war, while he was still a very tiny mite, he,
entirely of his own accord, always prayed for the soldiers. When asked
by his mother if he would like to be a soldier, his answer was--

'I would neither like to kill nor to be killed,'--a very sensible reason
to have been thought out by so young a child.

His aunt says of him--

'I never knew so sweet a child.'

And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were
beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed.
Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest
in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best.

Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse
at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie'
lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her
brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of
that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and
to whom he sings--

'If two may read aright
These rhymes of old delight,
And house and garden play
You two, my cousins, and you only may.

'You in a garden green,
With me were king and queen,
Were soldier, hunter, tar,
And all the thousand things that children are.'

With these two cousins the favourite game was the fleeing from,
conquering, and finally slaying a huge giant called Bunker, invented by
Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted the manse garden, and required
continual killing. One time, on the Bonaly Road, they were shipwrecked
hungry sailors, who ate so many buttercups that the little boys were
poisoned and became very ill, and the little girl only escaped because
she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy
memories' they sailed ships richly laden with whin pods for vanilla, and
yellow lichen for gold. They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse
candles, and were much disappointed they never saw anything more
terrible, in the gruesome place where the sexton kept his tools, than a
swaying branch of ivy.

Of the tall, pale, venerable grandfather, with his snowy hair, Louis
stood a good deal in awe; and he tells us in his charming paper, 'The
Manse,' in _Memories and Portraits_, that he had not much in common with
the old man although he felt honoured by his connection with a person
reverend enough to enter the pulpit and