elders' seat hearken to these happy songs of merry cheer coming to
them as echoes from the well-nigh forgotten past. His father often
sat by his sick-bed, and beguiled his small son from fears and pains
by tales "of ship-wreck on outlying iron skerries' pitiless
breakers, and great sea-lights, clothed in language apt, droll and
emphatic." His mother and Cummie read to him day and night. Thus
early the instinct of authorship was fired within him.

One evening the young Stevenson realised that the printed page was
intelligible to him. It was as if a rock that barred his entrance
into the cave of treasure had melted, or swung back at his command.
Till then Louis had been keen, like other youngsters, on adopting
many professions when he grew up. Soldiering, even in the Crimean
War time, did not appeal to the girlishly gentle little chap, for,
as he shrewdly remarked, he neither wanted to kill anybody nor be
killed himself. When he learned to read, he saw before him all the
rows of books which he was told had finer stirring stories in them
than even those his father told him, and he resolved he, too, would
be a maker of tales.

Those wide apart but penetrating eyes of his had caught sight of an
ideal guiding star to follow, viz., Literature. His juvenile
ambition to be a "Leerie licht the lamp" faded. To reach the gleam
which had enamoured him, he knew he must build with care and
patience, like his family of engineers, a tower to enclose or a
ladder to reach to this will-o'-the-wisp which inveigled him upward.
His mind teemed with ideas; but he saw he would have to serve an
apprenticeship to learn to weave smoothly together the web of his
fancy, till, in his verbal fabric, he had the charm of all the muses
flowering in a single word.