Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/36



OUIS STEVENSON, in one of his chance autobiographic glimpses, tells us how he came to accompany his father on an inspection of the harbour lights of Fife. "It was," he says, "my first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man without the help of petticoats." A great influence had these petticoats in bending his thoughts aright, when he was but a green twig. Their patience, their cheerfulness, flooded the dawn of his life with sunshine, and the very remembrance of these palmy days filled him with joyousness, for, as Sydney Smith says, "If you make children happy, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it." He was a lucky-starred boy. Fortune had gifted him with two sterling mothers, for the nurse to whom he so touchingly dedicated his "Garden of Verses" held a place in his affections only second to one. Along with Mrs. Stevenson, this mother of his adoption, Alison Cunningham, tended him with a care to which he owed his life. His nurse is now the only one of the petticoated angels of his infant life left. Mrs. Stevenson, in May, 1897, was laid beside her husband under the good Scots sods their son had longed to rest below. She had not dreamed she would have wept the eyes that should have wept for her, and had, when left a widow, transplanted herself and the endeared belongings of her married home to Samoa. When, her son died she returned to the Old World for one tie she had left there—her elder sister (the Auntie of Louis' Verses), who had always been a centre in her family. This Miss Balfour had mothered Mrs. Stevenson in her school days, and now the later generation of orphans she had reared being started in life, she needed her younger sister to be eyes and ears to her, when sight and hearing were failing. Glad were Mrs. Stevenson's old friends when she re-settled in Edinburgh with this senior sister, in a house overlooking river and sea, with