Wild and like a boy

Happy hearts and happy faces,

Happy play in grassy places—

That was how, in ancient ages,

Children grew to kings and sages.

(Good and Bad Children)

Louis never forgot Manse and his happy summers there. But he and Cousin Bob found other ways to spend their summers. One year they went to Peebles, near Edinburgh. Peebles has hilly fields and pasturelands and the River Tweed flowing through them. Peebles had plenty of space for Bob and Louis to gallop along on their ponies. They had a girl playmate at Peebles—that is, when they let her come along. She had a pony named Heaven.

“We’re riding to Innerleithen,” they told her one day. “You can ride with us if you can keep up.”

Off they galloped⁹ with Heaven after them. The boys rode straight into the Tweed River and swam their ponies across. Heaven had to follow or be left out. Up Heaven came stumbling on the other bank, his rider gasping and wet and ready to cry.

"Louis is getting very wild and like a boy,” sighed Mrs. Stevenson when she heard about it.

Summers that the boys spent at North Berwick were greater fun than at Peebles. North Berwick was a fisherman’s village on the Firth of Forth. It was far out, where the Firth widens into the North Sea. It had a sandy beach and cliffs and caves along the shore where pirates once had hidden treasure, and not far away a ruined castle. Behind the town stretched wide fields called links. Many vacationers played golf on the links.

But young Stevenson and his friends preferred other games—boat races on the water or flying giant kites. The game they loved best was lantern- bearing. They had to wait until summer was nearly over for it, because it had to be dark for lantern- bearing. When the days grew short and darkness fell early, and the nights on the links seemed haunted, every boy got out his bull’s-eye lantern.

A bull’s-eye lantern is the kind that fastens on a man’s belt and shines a light in front of him. He can button his overcoat over the lantern so that no one can see his light. Louis and his friends made a great mystery of their lanterns. As soon as it was dark, they came out of the cottages with smelly, oil-burning lanterns hidden under their coats.

“Have you got your lantern?” was the password.

And the answer had to be, “Yes.”

Off they would go to explore a fishing ship tied up at the pier. Or they would disappear over the links to a hollow place in the ground, where the town couldn’t see their lights. Only boys who could show a light dared come to the secret meeting. They would huddle close together and talk about all manner of topics that they couldn’t discuss when girls and grownups were around.

The lantern-bearing season never lasted long enough. The days grew shorter and the nights grew colder, and Louis was headed back to Edinburgh once more.

Winters in a city so far north gave Louis Stevenson another sport that he loved—ice skating. There was always plenty of ice on ponds and lakes in Edinburgh for that. One of his favorite skating haunts was Duddingston Loch at the foot of a hill called Arthur’s Seat.

RLS was a skinny and awkward boy, and he bent way over when he skated. The fashions of the times made him look even odder. His trousers were tight and his jacket was short. He had a flowing, flopping bow tie under his chin, and a fur cap pulled down over his ears.

He entered Edinburgh Academy the fall that he was eleven. This school was on Henderson Row, several blocks farther away from home than the one on India Street. When Louis first went there in October, he found himself walking across a yard and into a huge building that had big round columns in front. There were more than sixty boys in his class, two of them his cousins. That meant that there were sixty boys to taunt him instead of just a handful. Louis was so strange that the same thing happened again. He didn’t play football or cricket. He was too bright in his lessons. And he was always losing time from school with colds and coughs.

More than once he came home from Edinburgh Academy, his clothes torn, angry and sobbing, “They’ve been ragging me! They’ve been ragging me!”

"Smout is so high-strung!” said his mother.

“He’s much too sensitive,” said his father. “I wish he wouldn’t lose his temper so easily.”¹⁰

His parents worried about his happiness, but they never worried about his grades. They knew he could learn fast and they knew he could read well. Mr. Stevenson had plenty of books in his own library—books on nature and engineering, encyclopedias and novels. Louis was soon reading the stories of Sir Walter Scott and Alexander Dumas.

“Do the best you can at school,” his father said.

During his second term at Edinburgh Academy Louis missed a big piece of the school term. His

father hadn’t been feeling well, so the Stevenson family took a trip to London and southern England.

“School can wait,” said Mr. Stevenson. “Travel is just as educational.”

Twelve-year-old Stevenson saw London for the first time in his life. London was bigger and more crowded than Edinburgh. And it was flat, not built up and down hills the way his own city was built. The people who hurried through the streets had a flat way of talking. They didn’t have any Scottish burr in their talk. They didn’t roll their “r’s” or sing their words. When the Scots talked, everything sounded like poetry.

The next winter Mrs. Stevenson was feeling poorly, and the three Stevensons went in search of a sunny climate for her.

“I think we can forget Edinburgh Academy altogether,” said Mr. Stevenson.

They started out in January, and Louis wasn’t back in Edinburgh until the end of May. It was a grand trip—all through France and Italy. Louis discovered that he liked to travel.

“How do you like France, Smout?”

Smout the excitable! Smout with his imagination. Smout who was going to be a writer of thrilling stories and poetry some day. He loved France, especially southern France where they were staying. He loved it because of its beautiful colors.

They were in the town of Mentone, right on the Mediterranean Sea, close to Italy. The sea was a smooth, vivid blue and glistened in the brilliant sim. The houses in Mentone had red tile roofs. Right behind the town rose giant peaks of the Alps Mountains. The mountains were green part of the way up, then gray-blue-purple, and their tips were capped with snow.

They stayed at Mentone two months, sun bathing and sea bathing and strolling about. Smout had French lessons, too.

Before the Stevensons returned to Scotland they went sight-seeing through Italy. There Louis saw more exciting sights. In Rome he saw the big round Colosseum where the ancient Romans held their combats. He saw the ruins of Pompeii, the city that had been buried by the lava from Mount Vesuvius. In Venice the streets were watery canals, and Smout and his parents had to travel in a boat.

By the time Louis found himself back in London, his mind was a whirl of new sights, new stories, new pictures.

To add to his excitement¹¹ his parents let him make the train journey back to Edinburgh alone. Mrs. Stevenson wanted to visit in London for a while with Aunt Jane.

When at last he was back in the house on Heriot Row, he could talk and chatter with Cummy and tell her all he had seen.

Chapter IV