re, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in the
stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree. His
cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that this
foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights for
seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.

"Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much humour.
When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned and had a
want of balance. This made him feel his honest father's sensible
remarks like the sting of a whip."

Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:

"The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited,
egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and
sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not. Posing
as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself. He had
not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted
friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel,
he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in
_Weir of Hermiston_."

CHAPTER V--TRAVELS

His interest in engineering soon went--his mind full of stories and
fancies and human nature. As he had told his mother: he did not care
about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted to know
something of human beings.

No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who wished
him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family, though he
had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the engineering was
given up, and he consented to study law. He had already contributed to
College Magazines, and had had even a short spell of editing one; of one
of these he has given a racy account. Very soon after his call to the
Bar articles and essays from his pen began to appear in _Macmillan's_,
and later, more regularly in the _Cornhill_. Careful readers soon began
to note here the presence of a new force. He had gone on the _Inland
Voyage_ and an account of it was in hand; and had done that tour in the
Cevennes which he has described under the title _Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes_, with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey,
but on that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease
already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately remained.

He never practised at the Bar, though h