needful one too; for as it was the rule to keep our glory contained,
none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like a polecat, by the
smell.

"The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night,
the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping whether to
conduct your footsteps or make your glory public, a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark, and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt and exult
and sing over the knowledge."

In later years one of the Lantern Bearers describes Louis as he was
then. "A slender, long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, with an
undescribable influence that forced us to include him in our play as a
looker on, critic and slave driver.... No one had the remotest intention
of competing with R.L.S. in story making, and his tales, had we known
it, were such as the world would listen to in silence and wonder."

At home and at his last school he was always starting magazines. The
stories were illustrated with much color and the magazines circulated
among the boys for a penny a reading. One was called _The Sunbeam
Magazine_, an illustrated miscellany of fact, fiction, and fun, and
another _The School Boy Magazine_. The latter contained four stories and
its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their
fill of horrors--"regular crawlers," Louis called them. In the first
tale, "The Adventures of Jan Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a
boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is a "Ghost Story" of
robbers in a deserted castle.... The third is called, "by curious
anticipation of a story he was to write later on, 'The Wreckers.'"