Page:Robert Louis Stevenson - a Bookman extra number 1913.djvu/39

 bairn, and I read his havers to his mother at the nursery fire." When others spoke of him as the masterly master of his pen, the petticoated guardians of his youth still loved to speak of him as Smout his father's name for him. They pictured him hiding in the manse garden at Colinton, while they, the seekers, wandered about pretending they could not see the girlishly-dressed boy in blue so obviously hidden. Not only "the little feet along the floor" did the mother often chance to hear in after years, but also his piping voice, asking in the childish refrain, "How far is it to Babylon?" as he and his cousins sang by the water door, wondering if they would reach that distant city "by candle light." Cummy kept a journal in these days, in which she registered small Smoutie's first words, his pretty sayings, his precocious chatter, his fertile make-believes. Thinking she was nigh unto death once, she burned this chronicle. "I mind every word he said to me," she says, "and when his mamma and I looked at the photographs of him in the frocks I made for him, we seemed to see him playing about again so happy like." Their minds were so filled with him they never quite realised his own words:

"On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words inscribed, 'He clung to his paddle, Louis said in his first book, "The Inland Voyage." In this watery journey the Arethusa had born him gallantly down the Oise, till it rushed below a fallen tree, and then the canoe absconding, like Absalom's steed, left her skipper entangled in the branches. "Death himself had me by the heels," he wrote, "for this was his last ambuscade, and he must now personally join in the fray. And still I clung to my paddle." The paddle with which he plied his course in life, and steered therewith into our hearts was in reality his pen. He clung to it despite adverse currents, and moreover wielded it with a boyish gaiety of spirit which showed his heroic pluck. "Gladly I lived," he truly sang. His contented, happy temperament he owed in a great measure to the help of the petticoats who shielded his youthful years. They never willingly thwarted or out of laziness refused any reasonable request of the delicate boy they cherished. They petted him without spoiling him. They taught him despite the many months his feeble health