It is all there to-day: the damp old harled manse beside the parish church; the graveyard with its ancient tombs and the great iron coffin,--memento of the days of “resurrectionist” terror; the great swirling brown river under the magnificent trees of Colinton Dell; even the “weir with its wonder of foam,” and the old mill with the “wheel in the river.” It is one of the prettiest spots round Edinburgh, cool and quiet, with the reflections of the branches on the brown, foam-flecked surface of the deeper pools; and, close to the village end of the Dell, where the tall, wonderful cedars stand high against the sky above the manse and the church, there is a little fragment of ruin half-hidden among the trees on the steep bank, and tradition speaks vaguely, but suggestively, of a forgotten hermit and his cell. The village itself is changed since Stevenson knew it. There is now a little double line of railway passing through, and an occasional train puffs out of a rocky tunnel into a little station, and presently proceeds on its leisurely way up the valley. The old parts of Colinton remain in picturesque patches, but round them has blossomed forth a community of red-roofed, gabled houses, with quaint latticed windows, and every shade of “harled” walls. They face every way; but whichever way they face they command lovely views, seen through the clear, brisk Midlothian air, across fields under the rule of the famed Midlothian farming, and to the grand range of the Pentlands, with the beautiful, richly-coloured valley between, and overhead a Scottish sky of great fleecy clouds and deep blue vistas. Of Stevenson it may be submitted that he was a wandering sheep who did not love the fold; and his _Picturesque Notes_, for all their literary value, are tinged with the Calvinism he learnt at his nurse’s knee, and inhaled unconsciously in his native air, and that glooms his outlook even whilst he is most jeeringly observant of its effects on others. He was not happy in Edinburgh. But, underlying all the sarcasm, all the sneers, all the bitterness and fretfulness--whether directed at convention, custom, clothes, creeds, or climate--one seems to hear the cry of despairing indignation of youth lacking its birthright of strength and health.