He writes of her when speaking of long nights he lay awake unable to
sleep because of a troublesome cough: "How well I remember her lifting
me out of bed, carrying me to the window and showing me one or two lit
windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of garden, where also,
we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses
waiting, like us, for the morning."

Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life.
One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the
_Juvenilia_ was called "Nurses." Fifteen years later came the
publication of the "Child's Garden of Verses" with a splendid tribute to
her as a dedication. He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters
to her, and invited her to visit him. She herself tells that the last
time she ever saw him he said to her, "before a room full of people,
'It's _you_ that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,' 'Me, Master
Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay,
woman,' said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting
the hymns.'"

When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book
as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.

This was Louis's first real literary attempt. He was not able to write
himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its
cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.

He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, "it was the desire
of his heart to be an author."

During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray