He describes to us how he became a skilled artificer with his pen,
and how with obstinate persistence he taught himself daintiness of
diction. In his first book of travels he mentions how the branch of
a tree caught him, and the flooded Oise bereft him of his canoe. "On
my tomb, if ever I have one," he wrote, "I mean to get these words
inscribed, HE CLUNG TO HIS PADDLE." The paddle he chose was his pen.
It was the motive power which forwarded him along the river of life,
through shoals and rapids. When but a wee toddling bairn, he drew
his nurse aside and commanded her to write, as he had a story to
tell. He dictated to his mother, too, when a boy of six, an essay on
Moses. As a housebound child, he had to amuse himself. Skelt's
dramas were then his delight; but the life of every child is a
prophecy for those who know how to interpret it. His mother was
prescient, and fore-told her white-faced Louis had the light of
genius in those windows of the soul--the eyes. "Talent," she knew,
"was the result of human labor and culture." He dreamed, when but
four, he "heard the noise of pens writing." She took it and his
childish "Songstries" he sung as an earnest of his future.

Louis' father, despite being, like Dr. John Brown's Rab, "fu' o'
seriousness," had odd whims, among others, an objection to schools
and lessons, so he raised no objection to his son's regulation
school-days being intermittent. When barely in his teens, Stevenson
was ordered South, and spent two winters abroad. He was a pupil at
Edinburgh Academy for a few years. Andrew Lang was there at the same
time; but, he explains, the future Tusitala,--"the lover of
children, the teller of tales, giver of counsel, and dreams, a
wonder, a world's delight,"--and he did not meet there, for Louis
was "but a little whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some