Another old-time enjoyment of that date was a snowball fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a really great snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were Homeric combats, and a source of keen enjoyment to Robert Louis Stevenson, a very funny account of whom, on one of these occasions, was given me at the time by his cousin, Lewis Balfour, from Leven, himself a jovial medical student enjoying an active part in the melée. On the occasion of a great battle in the winter of 1869—or 1870—Mr Stevenson and one or two men, now well known in various professions, had seated themselves on a ledge in the quadrangle to watch the fight. From this vantage ground they encouraged the combatants, but took no active part in the fray. Within swarmed the students armed with snowballs, without, the lads of the town, equally active, stormed the gates. All were too intent on the battle to notice the advent of the police, who rushed into the college quadrangle and made prisoners where they could. Craning his neck too much, in his keen enjoyment, Mr Stevenson overbalanced himself, slipped from his perch and was promptly captured by 'a bobby,' and, in spite of gallant efforts for his rescue, was ignominiously marched off to the Police Office at the very moment that his blandly unconscious mother was driving up the Bridges. It was useless for his attendant friends to assert that he had been a non-combatant. Was he not taken in the very thick of the fight? The police had him and they meant to keep him for he could not produce sufficient bail from his somewhat empty pockets. His cousin and his friends, by leaving all their stray coins, their watches and other valuables, managed to secure his release so that he had not the experience—which it is possible he might have enjoyed—of passing a night in the police cells of his native city.
In his introduction to the Memoirs of Professor Fleeming-Jenkin, he himself tells a good story of his relations with that Professor, who was always a true and appreciative friend to his clever if idle student. He had handed in so few cards at the class of Engineering that his certificate was not forthcoming until he told his friend that his father would be very vexed if he could not produce the certificate—which he never intended to use—whereat the tender-hearted Professor handed it to him.
Another prime favourite of his among the Professors was Professor Kelland; and one can well understand the attraction which the dainty, gentle refinement of that most kind-hearted of men had for a nature so akin to it as young Stevenson's. All Professor Kelland's students loved him; this one understood him also. Professor Masson was one of the giants of those days whom he was also most capable of appreciating, and whose lectures he occasionally attended although not a member of his class; and, himself not without his amiable eccentricities, he could not fail to have a soft spot in his heart for the quaint humour and the pleasant eccentricity which endeared Professor Blackie to his class and to the public. He was a poor attender at the Greek Class, however, and when he presented himself for his certificate the keen blue eyes of the Professor looked at him critically, and the Professor's remark was that he had been so seldom present at lectures it was hardly possible to recognise his face!
Many of the students of that day have taken a good place in the world; some of them have long ere now left the things of time behind them; one or two of them Mr Stevenson has pictured in his graphic pages. Several of them regarded him as an interesting personality, but very few of them suspected that he was 'the chiel amang them takin' notes' for future work that would bring world-wide fame, not only to himself, but to his University and to the city of his birth.
On the 2nd March 1869 he was proposed by George Melville, Esq., Advocate, as a member of the Speculative Society, and we know from Memories and Portraits how much he appreciated his membership of that Society, which has in its day included in the roll, on which his name stood No. 992, most of the men whose names are honoured in Scotland's capital, and many of whom the fame and the memory are revered in far places of the earth. That he might smoke in the hall of the Speculative, in the very stronghold of University authority, he playfully professes to have been his chief pleasure in the thing; but other men, to whom his earnest face, his eagerness in debate, made one of the pleasures of its meetings, tell another story, and it was commonly said in those days that there would always be something of interest in hand if Stevenson took a part in it.
When he forsook the profession of engineering, Mr Stevenson attended the Law classes at the University, with the intention of being called to the Bar, but it is not on record that he was a more exemplary student of law than he had been of engineering, and he still found more satisfaction in his truant rambles and his meditations in old graveyards than he did in the legitimate study of his profession.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Cairketton is the form used in the Ordnance Survey.