his life, in the years when he was most of a correspondent, was in truth a tale of daily and nightly battle against weakness and physical distress and danger. To those who loved him, the incidents of this battle were communicated, sometimes gravely, sometimes laughingly. I have very greatly cut down such bulletins, but could not manage to omit them altogether. Generally speaking, I have used the editorial privilege of omission without scruple where I thought it desirable. And in regard to the text, I have not held myself bound to reproduce all the author’s minor eccentricities of spelling and the like. As all his friends are aware, to spell in a quite accurate and grown-up manner was a thing which this master of English letters was never able to learn; but to reproduce such trivial slips in print is, I think, to distract the reader’s attention from the main matter. A normal orthography has therefore been adopted throughout. Lastly, I have to express my thanks to my friend Mr. George Smith, proprietor of the _Dictionary of National Biography_, for permission to reprint in this and in following sectional introductions a few paragraphs from that work. S. C. _August_ 1899. I STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS 1868–1873 INTRODUCTION. THE following section consists chiefly of extracts from the correspondence and journals addressed by Louis Stevenson, as a lad of eighteen to twenty-two, to his father and mother during summer excursions to the Scottish coast or to the continent. There exist enough of them to fill a volume; but it is not in letters of this kind to his family that a young man unbosoms himself most freely, and these are perhaps not quite devoid of the qualities of the guide-book and the descriptive exercise. Nevertheless, they seem to me to contain enough signs of the future master-writer, enough of character, observation, and skill in expression, to make a few worth giving by way of an opening chapter to the present book. Among them are interspersed one or two of a different character addressed to other correspondents.