A damp and chilly house....

When Robert Louis Stevenson was just a couple of months old, the family moved from Howard Place (where he had been born) to Inverleith Terrace - just beside the Royal Botanic Gardens. The boy had inherited a tendency to coughs and chills from his mother's side, and this was not helped by living in this house - damp and chilly as it then was.

In fact, by the age of six the Stevensons had moved again.

Stevenson's father was a famous lighthouse designer, and he was responsible for more than 30 lighthouses round Scotland. It was an enormous disappointment to Thomas Stevenson that his son would not follow in the engineering tradition of the family, and that led to many arguments between them as the years passed by.

Was it memories made in this house that contributed to "A Child's Garden of Verses"? This one is called The Land of Nod..

From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are these for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.