have been out of keeping
among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and even red-faced
and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate) company, who daily walked the
Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there, often of other things
than law and equity. "Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the best," he
said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark that R. L.
Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever could have done as
a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly in his profession,
and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge.

There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the might-have-
beens when I talked with him on this subject. He had reconciled himself
in a way to the inevitable, and, like a sensible man, was now inclined to
make the most and the best of it. The marriage, which, on the report of
it, had been but a new disappointment to him, had, as if by magic, been
transformed into a blessing in his mind and his wife's by personal
contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson, which no one who ever met her
could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his dream of seeing his only son
walking in the pathways of the Stevensons, and adorning a profession in
Edinburgh, and so winning new and welcome laurels for the family and the
name, was still present with him constantly, and by contrast, he was
depressed with contemplation of the real state of the case, when, as I
have said, I pointed out to him, as more than once I did, what an
influence his son was wielding now, not only over those near to him, but
throughout the world, compared with what could have come to him as a
lighthouse engineer, however successful, or it may be as a briefless
advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in glory and in joy, the Hall of
the Edinburgh Parliament House. And when I pictured the yet greater
influence that was sure to come to him, he only shook his head with that
smile which tells of hopes long-cherished and lost at last, and of
resignation gained, as though at stern duty's call and an honest desire
for the good of those near and dear to him. It moved me more than I can
say, and always in the midst of it he adroitly, and somewhat abruptly,
changed the subject. Such penalties do parents often pay for the honour
of giving geniuses to the world. Here, again, it may be true, "the
individual withers but the world is more and more."

The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to when