preach the sermon every Sunday.
So many Balfours were scattered over the world, in India and the
Colonies, that the old rooms at the manse were full of eastern
curiosities and nick-nacks from distant lands dear to the hearts of
little folks. And, while the garden was a bower of delight, the house
was a veritable treasure trove to the grandchildren from far and near
who played in it.

To Robert Louis Stevenson, with his mind full of romance, it must have
been a paradise indeed, and one that he admirably pictures in the verses
addressed to an Anglo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has
returned to the India of her birth.

It is worth mentioning--as a note by the way which illustrates that
abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew
him--that four particularly hideous Indian idols stood guard at the hall
door of 'The Turret,' the house of his uncle, John Balfour, at Leven.
Two of them were life-size with their hands discreetly folded in prayer,
two of them were smaller and made in a kneeling posture, and, as
something rattled if you shook them, it was our juvenile belief that
treasure was concealed inside their bodies. This idea Mr R. L. Stevenson
eagerly fostered in the slightly younger generation, and, with the love
of harmless mischief natural to him, implored us to 'rattle them
_soundly_ when we were about it!'

In the manse garden at Colinton there was a mysterious and delightful
gap that gave egress to the Water of Leith, and to pass through this and
stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and wet world
beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were
already loudly calling to him to take 'the road' his wandering soul so
dearly loved.

'Keepsake Mill' is a charming tribute to the joys of those illicit
escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfellows now scattered in
far lands, or for ever at rest from life's labour, who played in the
garden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in
their games.

One sweet fancy of the imaginative child, who all his life had a fine
mental and physical courage in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled
by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard wall was at one place high above
the garden it partially enclosed, and the little boy, afflicted with no
superstitious terrors, had an idea that the souls of the dead people at
rest in 'God's acre,' peeped out at him from the chinks of the wall. And