his ancestors, still stands
gravely retired from the work-a-day world.

In the year 1867 he went with his father to the 'Dhu Heartach'
Lighthouse, and so began to develop that passion for the Western Isles
and the Western seas which future voyages in _The Pharos_ were to bring
to the state of fervour and perfection which gave birth of _The
Merrymen_, and to those descriptions of the wild and lovely scenery of
Appin and the West Highlands, in which David Balfour and Alan Breck
wander through the pages of _Kidnapped_.

It was his father's intention that he should follow the family
profession of engineering, and with this in view he went to the
Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1868. The professors in those days
included Professors Kelland, Tait, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin, Blackie,
Masson, and many others whose names are still remembered as 'a
sweet-smelling savour' in that Edinburgh which they and the truant
student, who honoured his class attendance 'more in the breach than the
observance,' loved so well.

It was a stirring time at the University, and the students who warred
manfully against the innovation of Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and the pioneers
of the Lady Doctors' movement, were, it would seem on looking back,
scarcely so mildly mannered, so peacefully inclined as those who now sit
placidly beside 'the sweet girl graduates' of our day, on the class-room
benches, and acknowledge the reign of the lady doctor as an accomplished
fact. A torchlight procession of modern times is apparently a cheerful
and picturesque function, smiled on by the authorities, and welcomed as
a rather unique means of doing honour to a new Lord Rector or some
famous guest of the city or the University. In Mr Stevenson's time, a
torchlight procession had all the joys of 'forbidden fruit' to the merry
lads who braved the police and the professors for the pleasure of
marching through the streets to the final bonfire on the Calton Hill,
from the scrimmage round which they emerged with clothes well oiled and
singed, and faces and hands as black as much besmearing could make them;
while anxious friends at home trembled lest a night in the police cells
should be the reward of the ringleaders.

Of one such procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies
were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever
student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis
Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something _very precio