Moral Emblems

From the opening

IT is with some diffidence that I sit down at an age so mature that I cannot bring myself to name it, to write a preface to works I printed and published at twelve.

I would have the reader see a little boy living in a châlet on a Swiss mountain-side, overlooking a straggling village named Davos-Platz, where consumptives coming to get well more often died. It was winter; the sky-line was broken by frosty peaks; the hamlet—it was scarcely more then—lay huddled in the universal snow. Morning came late, and the sun set early. A still, silent and icy night had an undue share of the round of hours, which at least it had the grace to mitigate by a myriad of shining stars.

The little boy thought it was a very jolly place. He loved the tobogganing, the skating, the snow-balling; loved the crisp, tingling air, and the woods full of Christmas trees, glittering with icicles. Nor with his toy theatre and printing-press was the indoor confinement ever irksome. He but dimly appreciated that his stepfather and mother were less happy in so favoured a spot. His mother’s face was often anxious; sometimes he would find her crying. His stepfather, whom he idolised, was terribly thin, and even to childish eyes looked frail and spectral. The stepfather was an unsuccessful author named Robert Louis Stevenson, who would never have got along at all had it not been for his rich parents in Edinburgh. The little boy at his lessons in the room which they all shared grew used to hearing a sentence that struck at his heart. Perhaps it was the tone it was uttered in; perhaps the looks of discouragement and depression that went with it.

It served to make the little boy very precocious about money. In a family perennially short of it he learned its essentialness early. He knew too, that he was a dreadfully expensive child.

A short sample. Read the whole book

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