was always my dearest," he wrote. This was a high certificate of
appreciation, when we remember he had the most devoted of mothers.
It hurt the son to the quick to deal his "dearest" a staggering
blow, and decline to follow his hereditary profession. Louis had
tried to be an engineer. He liked the swinging, smoking seas on
which they struggled for a site for sheltering masonry. As in the
case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to
him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author
had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to
study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to
follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling
and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were
excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth.
Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the
Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met
Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and
social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly,
idle, unpopular student," as he calls himself, enjoyed "its
atmosphere of good-fellowship, its vivid and varied interests, its
traditions of honourable labour and success." "Speculative
evenings," says R. L. S., "form pretty salient milestones on our
intellectual journey." He had gripped a deal of the foundations of
his hereditary trade when seemingly but a consistent idler. He
mastered the intricacies of law, and took to the abhorred office
stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery.
He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling
faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a
petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue.
W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who
helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of