Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life.  One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the Juvenilia was called “Nurses.”  Fifteen years later came the publication of the “Child’s Garden of Verses” with a splendid tribute to her as a dedication.  He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters to her, and invited her to visit him.  She herself tells that the last time she ever saw him he said to her, “before a room full of people, ‘It’s you that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,’ ’Me, Master Lou,’ I said, ‘I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.’  ’Ay, woman,’ said he, ’but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.’”

When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.

This was Louis’s first real literary attempt.  He was not able to write himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.

He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, “it was the desire of his heart to be an author.”

During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, usually called Bob, visited them; a great treat for Louis, not only because his ill health kept him from making many companions of his own age, but because Bob loved many of the same things he did and to “make believe” was as much a part of his life as Louis’s.  Many fine games they had together; built toy theatres, the scenery and characters for which they bought for a “penny plain and twopence colored,” and were never tired of dressing up.  One of their chief delights, he says, was in “rival kingdoms of our own invention—­Nosingtonia and Encyclopaedia, of which we were perpetually drawing maps.”  Even the eating of porridge at breakfast became a game.  Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while Louis’s was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by bit.

In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the watering-places near Edinburgh.  But the spot unlike all others for a real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of Edinburgh.  Here he spent glorious days.  Not only was there the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote: 

 “Chief of our aunts—­not only I,
  But all the dozen nurslings cry—­
  What did the other children do? 
  And what was childhood, wanting you?”

[Illustration:  Colinton Manse]