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He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey houses, looked for their familiar outline when winter prisoned him in Auld Reekie. These pastoral hills, with their sweeps of heathy moorlands, appear from first to last in his works.
Presently after, I came by a house where a shepherd lived, and got a rough direction for the neighbourhood of Cramond; and so, from one to another, worked my way to the westward of the capital by Colinton, till I came out upon the Glasgow road.
They too, like Fergusson's butterfly, had a quaint air of having wandered far from their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running mill-streams; there were corners that smelt like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils; and the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond.
Dr Burton was generally invited by the latter to meet his distinguished friend, the historian, Mr Anthony Froude. He may during these years have been once or twice a guest at Colinton House, then inhabited by Lord Dunfermline, and as often at Bonally, the house of his old friend the late Professor Hodgson.
With many playmates, free to roam and romp as he chose, his illness forgotten, it is no wonder he says he felt as if he led two lives, one belonging to Edinburgh and one to the country, and that Colinton ever remained an enchanted spot to which it was always hard to say good-by.
It was published through his father's interest on the two-hundredth anniversary of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in Scotland's history had been impressed on his mind by the numerous stories. Cummie had told him of the Covenanters and the fact that they had spent the night before their defeat in the town of Colinton.
And what was childhood, wanting you?" If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson, Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at Colinton.
"She had most graceful lines and with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, and glittering brass work, was a lovely craft to the eye as she sat upon the water." "I must try to describe the vessel that is to be our home for so long," Mrs. Stevenson, senior, wrote to her sister at Colinton. "From the deck you step down into the cockpit, which is our open air drawing room.
All his mother's people, the Balfours, were of a sanguine, hopeful strain, retaining an elasticity of spirit which never lessened under the burden of years. Stevenson writes of "that wise youth, my uncle," who was a grey-bearded doctor when his nephew thus referred to him. So from the daughter of the Herd of Men at Colinton he inherited his perennial youthfulness.
He was afterwards elected member for Edinburgh in 1832, and Speaker of the House of Commons in 1835. On Mr. Abercromby's retirement in 1839, he was raised to the Peerage as Lord Dunfermline. He died at Colinton House on April 17th, 1858, aged 81. Of this illness, Sir Walter had written the following account to Mr. Lockhart, a week after its occurrence:
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