'I would neither like to kill nor to be killed,'—a very sensible reason to have been thought out by so young a child.
His aunt says of him—
'I never knew so sweet a child.'
And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed. Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best.
Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie' lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and to whom he sings—
'If two may read aright
These rhymes of old delight,
And house and garden play
You two, my cousins, and you only may.
'You in a garden green,