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
lower class," when his future brother author was "an elderly boy of
seventeen.
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