Thomas Stevenson was bitterly disappointed that his only son should
choose to be what he called "an idler"--generous to a fault and always
out of money, dressing in a careless and eccentric way, which both
amused and annoyed his friends and caused him to be ridiculed by
strangers, preferring to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scraping
acquaintance with the fishwives and dock hands, rather than staying at
home and mingling in the social circle to which his parents belonged.
But his father was still more troubled by certain independent religious
opinions, far different from those in which he had been reared, that
Louis adopted at this time.

How any good result could come from all this neither his father nor
mother could see, and with the loss of their sympathy he was thrown upon
himself and was lonely and rebellious.

He longed to get away from it all, to quit Edinburgh with its harsh
climate, and often on his walks he leaned over the great bridge that
joins the New Town with the Old "and watched the trains smoking out from
under, and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies." He
longed to go with them "to that Somewhere-else of the imagination where
all troubles are supposed to end."

It was a comfort to him at this time to remember other Scotchmen,
Jeffries, Burns, Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who had roamed
these same streets before him, not a few of them fighting with the same
problems he faced in their struggle to win their ideal.

This unhappy time, this "Greensickness," as he called it, came to an
end, however, through the help of what Louis had always secretly longed
for--friends. Several whom he met at this time influenced him, but first