as
the style is concerned it is the product of time and thought, and it was
most carefully and diligently formed by labour so earnest and
painstaking, that few authors can even conceive of it.

In _Memories and Portraits_ Mr Stevenson gives a delightful account of
boyish days at a seaside resort, that is evidently North Berwick, and
lovingly describes adventures with bull's-eye lanterns; adventures which
seem to be intimately associated with the young folk of his connection,
and which repeated themselves a few years later on the other side of the
Forth, where boys and girls recalled the doings of Robert Louis and his
friends with bull's-eye lanterns and gunpowder, in that cheerful form
known to Louis Stevenson as a 'peeoy,' and considered it a point of
honour to do likewise, no matter how indignant such mischief made the
authorities. As for him, he was always the inventor and prime mover in
every mischievous escapade the heart of youth could glory in.

The wind-swept coast about North Berwick had a strong fascination for
him, and in several of his books we feel the salt breeze blowing in from
the sea, across the bents, and hear the sea birds crying on the lonely
shore. The autumn holidays were a great joy to him, and another
epoch-making event must have been the taking of Swanston Cottage, in May
1867, to be the summer home of the Stevensons.

The boy took intense pleasure in his rambles about the hills, in his
dreamy rests on 'Kirk Yetton'[2] and 'Allermuir,' and in his wanderings
with John Todd, the shepherd, after that worthy had ceased, as he
comically puts it, to hunt him off as a dangerous sheep-scarer, and so
to play 'Claverhouse to his Covenanter'! The two soon became great
friends, and many a bit of strange philosophy, many a wild tale of
bygone droving days the lad heard from the old man. Another great friend
of early Swanston years was Robert Young, the gardener, whose austere
and Puritan views of life were solemnly shared with his young master.

Existence at Swanston was even more provocative of truant-playing than
it had been in Edinburgh, and Louis, in his later school days and his
early sessions at the University, was more than ever conspicuous by his
absence from classes, more lovingly wedded to long hours among the
hills, long rambles about the 'Old Town,' the Figgate Whins, the port of
Leith, and the rapidly changing localities round Leith Walk, somewhat
back from which, Pilrig, the ancient home of