sleepless nights - without troubles, sorrows, and perplexities, and
even yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or the results
of them. His voice was "low and sweet" - with just a possibility
in it of rising to a shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man,
who had walked very demurely through life, though with a touch of
sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing
the grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and
drawing effect from it. He was most frank and genial with me, and
I greatly honour his memory. (2)

Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a
disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always
called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow
up his profession at the Scottish Bar. How much he had looked
forward, after the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting
himself to the work of the Parliament House (as the Hall of the
Chief Court is called in Scotland, from the building having been
while yet there was a Scottish Parliament the place where it sat),
though truly one cannot help feeling how much Stevenson's very air
and figure would have been out of keeping among the bewigged,
pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and even red-faced and red-nosed
(some of them, at any rate) company, who daily walked the
Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there, often of other
things than law and equity. "Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the
best," he said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark
that R. L. Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever
could have done as a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen
rapidly in his profession, and become Lord-Advocate or even a
judge.