to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in the manse of Colinton on the Water of Leith, the home of his maternal grandfather. Of this place his childish recollections were happy and idyllic, while those of city life were coloured rather by impressions of sickness, fever, and nocturnal terrors. If, however, he suffered much as a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures, of imagination. Illness confined him much within the house, but imagination kept him always content and busy. In the days of the Crimean war some one gave the child a cheap toy sword; and when his father depreciated it, he said, ‘I tell you, the sword is of gold, and the sheath of silver, and the boy is very well off and quite contented.’ As disabilities closed in on him in after life, he would never grumble at any gift, however niggardly, of fortune, and the anecdote is as characteristic of the man as of the child. He was eager and full of invention in every kind of play, whether solitary or sociable, and seems to have been treated as something of a small, sickly prince among a whole cousinhood of playmates of both the Balfour and the Stevenson connections. He was also a greedy reader, or rather listener to reading; for it was not until his eighth year that he began to read easily or habitually to himself. He has recorded how his first conscious impression of pleasure from the sound and cadence of words was received from certain passages in M‘Cheyne’s hymns as recited to him by his nurse. Bible stories, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and Mayne Reid’s tales were especially, and it would seem equally, his delight. He began early to take pleasure in attempts at composition of his own. A history of Moses, dictated in his sixth year, and an account of travels in Perth, in his ninth, are still extant. Ill health prevented him getting much regular or continuous schooling. He attended first (1858–61) a preparatory school kept by a Mr. Henderson in India Street; and next (at intervals for some time after the autumn of 1861) the Edinburgh Academy. One of his tutors at the former school writes: ‘He was the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling, ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun.’ From very early days, both as child and boy, he must have had something of that power to charm which distinguished him above other men in after life. ‘I loike that bo-o-o-o-y,’ a heavy Dutchman was heard saying to himself over and over again, whom at the age of about thirteen he had held in amused conversation during a whole passage from Ostend. The same quality, with the signs which he always showed of quick natural intelligence when he chose to learn, must have helped to spare him many punishments from teachers which he earned by persistent and ingenious truantry. ‘I