e tall, and with
soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to
deepen and change with every passing impression of his quick working
brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face
was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a
more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his
father's powerful physiognomy.

He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means
led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application
to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true,
voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable
classical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was
an historical student after a fashion of his own, dipping deep into such
books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His
geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited
form, and resolved itself into locating correctly the places and abodes
sacred to the characters in his favourite books.

In the delightful dedication of _Catriona_,--to Mr Charles Baxter, W.S.,
Edinburgh, who was his life-long friend--he describes those pilgrimages
charmingly, and one can, in imagination, see the eager lads wandering in
search of famous 'streets and numbered houses,' made historic for them
by some such magic pen as that which has for ever made sacred the _Old
Tolbooth_ or the _Heart of Midlothian_, from the coblestones of which,
in the pavement of St Giles and near the Parliament House, one
reverently steps aside lest careless feet should touch that memento of
the past. One can picture too as he himself does, the romantic boys of
to-day following the wanderings of David Balfour by Broughton and
Silver-mills, the Water of Leith, the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, and the
wind-swept shores of the Forth. But one can still more clearly see that
slim, brown-eyed youth--a-quiver with the eagerness that was so
conspicuous a characteristic of his,--as in these very places he
remembered bygone tales and even then formed plans for, and saw visions
of, his own stories yet to be.

One can think of him with his eyes shining, and his face luminous, as he
held forth to some choice friend, of sympathetic soul, on all these
things of which his heart and brain were so full. One knows that when
his walks were solitary his time was already put to a good account, and
that t