would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the
run of the smoking room. After ten p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door
was a rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for the mysterious was
whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and we liked his special
rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour or two of talk."

They teased him about his queer clothes and laughed at some of his wild
ideas, but he seldom was angry at them for it and never stayed away very
long.

With them he often skated on Duddington Loch or canoed on the Firth of
Forth. One summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the west coast of
Scotland, and still another year, when longing for further wandering
possessed them, they made a trip in canoes through the inland waters of
Belgium from Antwerp to Brussels, and then into France and by the rivers
Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris.

In the "Inland Voyage," where Stevenson describes this trip, he calls
Sir Walter and his canoe "Cigarette" while he was "Arethusa." Adventures
were plentiful, and they aroused much curiosity among the dwellers on
the banks, with whom they made friends as they went along.

Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when his canoe was overturned by the
rapids; and on several occasions, when they applied for a night's
lodging, they were suspected of being tramps or peddlers because of
their bedraggled appearance.

One evening after a hard day's paddling in the rain they landed tired,
wet, and hungry at the little town of La Fère. "The Cigarette and I
could not sufficiently congratulate each other on the prospect," says