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'In his puny, ailing infancy, his mother and his nurse Cummie had soothed and tended him; in his troubled hour of youth he had found an inspirer, consoler, and guide in Mrs.
His father often sat by his sick-bed, and beguiled his small son from fears and pains by tales "of ship-wreck on outlying iron skerries' pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights, clothed in language apt, droll and emphatic." His mother and Cummie read to him day and night. Thus early the instinct of authorship was fired within 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."
He fell asleep, soothed by her kind voice, to awake when the sun was bright on the window pane. Again he commanded, "Read to me, Cummie." "And what chapter would my laddie like?" she asked. "Why, it's daylight now," he answered; "I'm not afraid any longer; put away the Bible, and go on with Ballantyne's story."
"I have just to shut my eyes, To go sailing through the skies To go sailing far away To the pleasant Land of Play" he says. In spite of his power for amusing himself, days like these would have gone far harder had it not been for two devoted people, his mother and his nurse, Alison Cunningham or "Cummie" as he called her.
The climate suited them to perfection, and Stevenson particularly benefited by it, bathing daily in the warm surf and taking long walks along the beach in search of strange shells. "Here we are," his mother wrote to Cummie, "in a little bay surrounded by green mountains, on which sheep are grazing, and there are birds very like our own 'blackies' singing in the trees.
First he called it "The Penny Whistle," but soon changed the title to "A Child's Garden of Verses" and dedicated it, with the following poem, to the only one he said who would really understand the verses, the one who had done so much to make his childhood days happy: "Of course," he said, speaking of this dedication when he wrote to Cummie about the book, "this is only a flourish, like taking off one's hat, but still a person who has taken the trouble to write things does not dedicate them to anyone without meaning it; and you must try to take this dedication in place of a great many things that I might have said, and that I ought to have done; to prove that I am not altogether unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you."
She sang for him, danced for him, spun fine tales of pirates and smugglers, and read to him so dramatically that his mind was fired then and there with a longing for travel and adventure which he never lost. When they took their walks through the streets together Cummie had many stories to tell him of Scotland and Edinburgh in the old days.
All this charmed and delighted Stevenson, who had dreamed many times of witnessing just such a scene. He wrote to Cummie that he was living all over again many of the stories she had read to him and found them coming true about himself. For six weeks they cruised about among these islands, frequently dropping anchor and going ashore for several days.
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.
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