rning came the closet which held on
its deep shelves the best china. Little angel faces and reedy flutings
stood out round the fire-place of the children's room. And on the top
of the house, above the large attic, where the white mice ran in the
twilight--an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures,
glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrum of coloured silks,
among its lumber--a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of
the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said, stood near a great
city, which sent up heavenwards, over the twisting weather-vanes, not
seldom, its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or
sunshine. But the child of whom I am writing did not hate the fog
because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the
chimneys, and the whites which gleamed through its openings, on summer
mornings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose that a
child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special
fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this
indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; earlier, in
{171} some degree, we see inwardly, and the child finds for itself, and
with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in those whites and
reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the
dandelions at the road-side, just beyond the houses, where not a
handful of earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack of better
ministries to its desire of beauty.

(_Miscellaneous Studies_.)

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1850-1894

DIVING

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished
breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of
churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers
toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the
assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between wind
and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a
mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the
ladder. . . . To go down in the diving-dress, that was my absorbing
fancy; and with the countenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver,
Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.

It was grey harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out
in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at last
on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead