Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/27

 character among my fellow-students, this particular youth had already arrested my attention by the possession of exterior qualities which marked him off strongly from the rest of his comrades a certain grace and refinement of manner and person not very common among the academic communities of Scotland, and withal a free and unconventional air with which a black velvet jacket and flowing flaxen locks were well matched. His whole appearance was much more indicative of the poet or the æsthete than of the scientist; and yet here was this attractive youth tapping my shoulder in one of the front benches of the mathematical class. Was not my name so and so, and was not I the fellow who had sent in a poem to the editors of the University Magazine, of whom, he added, he was one. His co-editor, who was sitting near him engaged in the perusal of a love sonnet instead of a treatise on logarithms, was another young man of equally fascinating exterior and charming manners—Walter Ferrier, son of a St. Andrew's professor and grandson of Christopher North—a young man of high aspirations and great promise too soon blasted by death; and nothing would content these Arcades ambo but that they should at once launch out into the literary career and try their 'prentice hand on a monthly venture entitled the Edinburgh University Magazine—a venture which did not last very long, and probably, indeed, received its death blow from the verses, monopolising about a third of one number, which the editors were indiscreet enough to accept from me and insert in their otherwise sparkling enough pages. It was a cantata, partly in the Lowland Scots' dialect, written in imitation of one of Burns's larger pieces; and, though I would give my worst enemy a very considerable douceur rather than that he should now rake this effusion up against me, I am at the same time pleased and proud to think that it was the means of bringing me into personal contact with Robert Louis Stevenson, for that was the name of the young man who had tapped me on the shoulder. Stevenson was, on the whole, well pleased with my poem, though he insisted on making certain editorial emendations, some of which, however, I am bound to say did more credit to the delicacy of his taste than to the accuracy of that sense of rhythm of which he subsequently became so great a master. From the mathematical classroom we hastened to repair to the privacy of a snug house of entertainment close by, called "The Pump," there to continue our discussion over Edinburgh ale and cold meat