In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father in _The Pharos_ round the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.
Not the least pleasant of his volumes of _Essays_ is that called _Memories and Portraits_, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to
'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse, Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock, And the Lady Hollyhock.'
In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be.
Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, _The Silvarado Squatters_, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner's house--if one can by courtesy call a _house_ the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!--on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.