The Tropics vanish; and meseems that I From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again. Far set in fields and woods, the town I see Spring gallant from the shadow of her smoke, Cragged, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagged. R. L. STEVENSON. Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering his Edinburgh days, must have remembered three homes and many haunts. There was his parents’ town house, 17 Heriot Row; there was his grandfather’s manse at Colinton, set low in the old village graveyard by the river; and there was little Swanston, rented by his parents many years as a country residence, nestling in a little hollow high up on the edge of the Pentlands. During all Stevenson’s Edinburgh days from his eighth year 17 Heriot Row was his home proper. Heriot Row, one of the pleasantest resident streets in Edinburgh, is, like all Edinburgh resident streets, a row of grey stone houses built in absolute uniformity. It is built on the northern slope of the New City, parallel with the three large main streets,--Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street,--but below them, and is a single row of houses with an open outlook, facing the green trees and turf of the gardens that stretch between Heriot Row and Queen Street above. It was in the nursery facing the gardens and looking up to the dignified dwellings of Queen Street through the trees that the little fretful invalid child was soothed by his faithful Calvinistic nurse, Alison Cunningham, and that on summer evenings, after he had gone to bed, he lay listening to “grown-up people’s feet” on the street below, and watching the birds in the trees. Till yesterday, when electricity turned night into day, the lamplighter used to go quickly at evening along the Edinburgh streets with his ladder, fix the hook at the end of it into the cross-bar of each lamp-post in turn, run up, lift off the glass top, and light the lamp. Every small street urchin in Scotland knows the cry of “Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamps!”--and the little town child, in his cosy Edinburgh nursery, counted himself very lucky to have a lamp-post just before the front door of his home, and used to sit until his tea was ready and watch for “Leerie” posting down the street with his ladder and his light. The grandfather Balfour’s manse at Colinton was associated with holidays when all the young cousins played in the dark, shabby, homelike rooms, or, “sin without pardon,” broke the branches and got through a breach in the garden wall, and so to the joys of the river.