—"Child's Garden of Verses."
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born at No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850.
In 1852 the family moved from Howard Place to Inverleith Terrace, and two years later to No. 17 Heriot Row, which remained their home for many years.
As a child Louis was very delicate and often ill, for years hardly a winter passed that he did not spend many days in bed.
Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp and he tells us: "Many winters I never crossed the threshold, but used to lie on my face on the nursery floor, chalking or painting in water-colors the pictures in the illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed with a little shawl pinned about my shoulders, to play with bricks or what not."
The diverting history of "Hop-O'-My-Thumb" and the "Seven-League Boots," "Little Arthur's History of England," "Peter Parley's Historical Tales," and "Harry's Ladder to Learning" were books which he delighted to pore over and their pages bore many traces of his skill with the pencil and paint-brush.
Those who have read the "Child's Garden of Verses" already know the doings of his childish days, for although those rhymes were not written until he was a grown man he was "one of the few who do not forget their own lives" and "through the windows of this book" gives us a vivid and living picture of the boy who dwelt so much in a world of his own with his quaint thoughts.
If his body was frail his spirit was strong and his power of imagination so great that he cheered himself through many a weary day by playing he was "captain of a tidy little ship," a soldier, a fierce pirate, an Indian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. Miles he travelled in his little bed.
"I have just to shut my eyes,
To go sailing through the skies—
To go sailing far away
To the pleasant Land of Play"
he says.