Carlyle who vouches for the fact "that wondrous is the strength of
cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance."
Little store of bodily vigour had Robert Lewis; but with his
buoyant, enthusiastic, inquisitive spirit he accomplished a strong
man's task, "weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, mocking his
sorrows with a solemn jest." This treasured only son, worshipped by
his doting parents and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, who was a
second mother to him, reports himself to have been a good child. He
also says he had a covenanting childhood. In the mid-Victorian era,
a stricter discipline reigned over nurseries in Scotland's capital
than now. "The serviceable pause" in the week's work on Sunday was
not without real benefits, for the children of these times, if
sermons were long and the Sabbath devoid of toys, learned to sit
still and to endure, and very useful lessons they were to R. L. S.
and others. Despite being an extra model little soul," eminently
religious," he says, he was much like other children. His nurse
tells how, during one of the many feverish, wakeful nights he
suffered from, when he lay wearying for the carts coming (a sign to
him of morning), she read to him for hours at his request the Bible.
He fell asleep, soothed by her kind voice, to awake when the sun was
bright on the window pane. Again he commanded, "Read to me, Cummie."
"And what chapter would my laddie like?" she asked. "Why, it's
daylight now," he answered; "I'm not afraid any longer; put away the
Bible, and go on with Ballantyne's story."

"I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own
lives," he boasted. His Garden of Verses testifies to the truth of
this statement. When he was a man over thirty, he bridged the gulf
of years, and wrote of the golden days of childhood. Not only do the
little people joy to hear his piping, but those who sit in the