NOTES OF CHILDHOOD.

I was born in November 1850, in No. 8. Howard Place, Edinburgh, and from the first, I fancy, showed signs of crazy health. The only story of my infancy that I care to recollect, is as follows: a new feeding-bottle had been got for me; and the old one was already thrown out into the backgarden or on to the ash-pile, when it was discovered that I obstinately refused to have anything to do with the new one. and my father had to get a candle and go groping about among the rubbish until the old one was found again for the use of his conservative son. Not many years after my birth, we moved to another house in Innerleith Terrace; and I do not suppose that I can remember anything very definitely of Howard Place. I remember with particular pleasure, running up stairs with my mother - herself little more than a girl - to the top flat of this our second house; both of us singing, as best we could 'We'll all go up to Gatty's room - to Gatty's room &c., ad lib.': 'Gatty' being contracted for grandpapa, my mother's father, who was coming to stay with us. I mention that because it stands out in stronger relief than any other recollection of the same age; I have a great belief

2

in these vivid recollections: things that impress us so
forcibly as to become stereotyped for life, have not done so
for nothing. I believe I was what is called a good child:
I learned large passages of scripture and hymns, and recited
them I understand, with very good action and emphasis. After
I was in bed, I used to be heard lying awake and repeating
aloud to myself - crooning over to myself in the dark -
certain curious rambling effusions which I called my 'song-
tries.' One of these, which was taken down by my father,
who stood outside the door for the purpose - I have seen; it
was in a sort of rhythmic prose, curiously approximating to
10-syllable blank verse, and was religious in its bearing:
I think it is now lost. That I was eminently religious,
there can be no doubt. I had an extreme terror of Hell, im-
planted in me I suppose by my good nurse, which used to haunt
me most terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken
loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite: I re-
member that the noises, on such occasions, always grouped
themselves for me into the sound of a horseman, or rather a
succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of
the street and away up the hill into town; I think even now

3

that I hear the terrible *howl* of his passage and the clinking
that I used to attribute to his bit and stirrups. On such
nights I would lie awake and pray and cry - until I prayed
and cried myself asleep; and if I can form any notion of
what an earnest prayer should be, I imagine that mine were
such. Nevertheless, while I was so good a Christian, I was in reality
a very bad child; indeed, my early years were just about as
bad as any in my whole life and I cannot talk of

"the days when I
Shined in my angel infancy,"

with any colour of truth. I remember - and I think it worthy
of remark here, how almost all my recollections of this early
period, treat of the hours that I lay awake after I was put
duly to bed: I seem to have been then in a state of quite
morbid nervous exaltation, my mind working with an intensity
that has probably more or less affected me throughout life;
and I think that there may arise a reflection out of this,
which fathers and mothers might do well to make for themselves
and to act upon. To return, I remember on other nights, when
I was not in the vein for songstries and there was no uproar
of weather without, to turn my thoughts upon death and judge-

4

ment, that I exhibited the obverse of my early piety, in what
I seriously believe to be its correlate, precocious depravity.
You will find a parallel case in the memoirs of Walter Pringle
of Greenknow; whose early years from first to last reminded
me so strangely of my own, that I please myself often by say-
ing that I had a covenanting childhood. I do not wish to
dwell on the unpleasant side of this picture; but I cannot
pass away from the subject, without a word on the persistence
of attributes, of faults and virtues and tastes and talents -
of character in fact, which I can trace through all my back
years, even from these earliest recollections. I find that
same morbid bias, that I have had such hard ado to get under
within the last few years - and even now, it is not perfectly
extinct; I find the same small cowardice and small vanity,
ever ready to lead me into petty falsehood; I find also my
other things in the same state; so that I cannot allow that
those halycon-days or that time of 'angel infancy' have ever
existed for me. Rather, I was born, more or less, what I am
now - Robert Louis Stevenson, and not any other, or better
person.

All this time, be it borne in mind, my health was

5

of the most precarious description. Many winters, I never
crossed the threshold; but used to lie on my face on the
nursery floor, chalking or painting in water-colours the
pictures in the illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed,
with a little shawl pinned about my shoulders, to play with
bricks, or dolls, or what not. I remember the pleasant
maternal casuistry, by which I was allowed to retain my play-
things of a Sunday, when a pack was sewn on to the back of
one of the wooden figures and I had then duly promised to play
at nothing but 'Pilgrims Progress.' Similar evasions will
occur to the minds of all who have been brought up strictly
and in Scotland. I have said a good deal about my games and
of how purely imaginative they were, in a little paper writ-
ten some years ago, which, as being autobiographical in sub-
stance, I shall lay beside the present sheets. I need not
therefore go back again upon that subject; but I wish to dis-
cuss here, a curious point that occurs to me on a kindred
subject. That my mind was singularly definite and concrete
in those early days, I received amusing enough evidence, the
other month, by raking up out of some forgotten corner of my
memory, a version of the 23rd Psalm, as it appeared to me,

6

in the pictorial, or noun, stage of my intelligence. It ran
thus: To verse 1st, there was nothing but a vague conception
of a crook, which I suppose I had been shown in some arcadian
picture or another. For verse 2nd, there was a distinct^of
Cummy (my nurse) leading me, one autumn Sunday, down a green
stubble field that lay at the head of the Terrace, to the
edge of the water of Leith. Verse 3rd, had nothing for me be-
yond a <u>tinnulus</u> of meaningless words. In Verse 4th, again,
I found the archway in Waniston Cemetery; and a person walk-
ing in it in company with a rather knotty walking-stick and
a long thin spar like a billiard cue, the latter a little
bent over towards the man's ear. That Verse 5th had some
picture attached to it, I am almost certain; but the one
found had evidently been retouched in later days; and as for
Verse 6, a feeble photograph of elders at the plate, probably
suggested by 'the house of the Lord,' is all that it appears
to have brought home to me. That this was not peculiar to
me, or at least that it did not represent any special facul-
ty, but rather a natural stage of human apprehension, is in-
dicated by the fact that, although I was never done drawing
and painting, and even kept on doing so until I was seventeen

7

or eighteen, I never had any real pictorial vision and, in-
stead of trying to represent what I saw, was merely imitating
the general appearance of other people's representations. I
never drew a picture of anything that was before me, but al-
ways from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyes-
sight; and I beautifully illustrated my lack of real feeling
for art, by a very early speech, which I have had repeated to
me by my mother: 'Mamma,' said I, 'I have drawed a man.
Shall I draw his soul now?' - My ill health principally
chronicles itself by the terrible long nights, that I lay
awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough,
and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken
little body. I principally connect these nights however,
with our third house, in Heriot Row; and cannot mention them
without a grateful testimony to the unwearied sympathy and
long-suffering displayed to me on a hundred such occasions by
my good nurse, already mentioned. It seems to me that I
should have died, if I had been left there alone to cough and
weary in the darkness. How well I remember her lifting me
out of bed, carrying me to the window and showing me one or
two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of

8

gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick, little boys and their nurses, waiting, like us, for the morning. Other night-scenes connected with my ill-health, were the little sallies of delirium that used to waken me out of a feverish sleep, in such agony of terror as, thank God, I have never suffered since. I remember well the premonitory symptom; how everything used to grow before my eyes to such monstrous bigness as used to terrify me; and how it was only after dropping several times into a doze and wakening again - being plucked out of it again, so to speak - with the suddenness and bewilderment that accompanies a check to a fall, before I fell finally into the hot, unhealthy slumber that would end in my nightmare. One form of this derangement was of common recurrence: it turned on the last day and shows, once again, how deeply the idea of Hell had been seared into me. My father had generally to come up, and sit by my bedside and feign conversations with guards or coachmen or innkeepers, until I was gradually quieted and brought back to myself; but it was long, after one of these paroxysms, before I could bear to be left alone. The Lord protect you, reader, from similar hours; I know no real affliction to compare with them.

9

One consequence of my ill-health, was my frequent
residence at Colinton Manse. Out of my reminiscences of life
in that dear place, all the morbid and painful elements have
disappeared. I remember no more nights of storm; no more
terror or sickness. Beyond a thunderstorm when I was fright-
ened, after a half make-believe fashion, and huddled with
Willie and Henrietta underneath the dining-room table; and
a great flood of the river, to see which my father carried me
wrapped in a blanket through the rain; I can recall nothing
but sunshiny weather. That was my golden age; et ego in
Arcadia vixi. There is something so fresh and wholesome
about all that went on at Colinton, compared with what I re-
collect of the town that I can hardly, even in my own mind,
knit the two chains of reminiscences together; they look
like stories of two different people, ages apart in time and
quite dissimilar in character.

Swanston.

Sunday, 18th May 1873.