“The roaring skerry and the tossing boat,” appealed to him as they had to his grandfather before him, but they did not balance his dislike for the “office and the stool” or make him willing to devote his time and energy to working for them, so his university record was very poor.  “No one ever played the truant with more deliberate care,” he says, “and no one ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.”

One thing that he gained from his days at the university was the friendship of Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  He was fifteen years older than Louis, but they had many common interests and the professor had much good influence over him.  He was one of the first to see promise in his writing and encouraged him to go on with it.

Both the professor and Mrs. Jenkin were much interested in dramatics and each year brought a group of friends together at their house for private theatricals.  Stevenson was a constant visitor at their home, joining heartily in these plays and looking forward to them, although he never took any very important part.

After Professor Jenkin’s death Stevenson wrote his biography, and says it was a “mingled pain and pleasure to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter.”

About this time Thomas Stevenson bought Swanston Cottage in the Pentland Hills, about five miles from Edinburgh, and for the next fourteen years the family spent their summers there, and Louis often went out in winter as well.  It ever remained one of his favorite spots and with Colinton stood out as a place that meant much in his life.

[Illustration:  Swanston Cottage]

These years saw great change in him; from a frank and happy child he had grown into a lonely, moody boy making few friends and shunning the social life that his father’s position in Edinburgh offered him.  He describes himself as a “lean, ugly, unpopular student,” but those who knew him never applied the term “ugly” to him at any time.

At Swanston he explored the hills alone and grew to know them so well that the Pentland country ever remained vividly in his memory and found its way into many of his stories, notably “St. Ives,” where he describes Swanston as it was when they first made it their summer home.

Many solitary winter evenings he spent there rereading his favorite novels, particularly Dumas’s “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” which always pleased him.  “Shakespeare has served me best,” he said.  “Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind.  Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D’Artagnan, the elderly D’Artagnan of the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne.’

“I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd, a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the fire.”