which President Taft originally proposed or in the modified form of the draft treaty. Vital interests on questions affecting the honor of a nation cannot, it is said, be referred to arbitration. The oldest law of private arbitration declared invalid submissions as to the status of a freeman or questions involving infamia; and so should it be with nations. There may be a sense in which this is true, but it is not the sense in which the exclusion from arbitration of certain questions is urged. States cannot, any more than individuals, submit to extinction because an arbitrator's award decrees it. Nor can they, any more than individuals, submit to do that which is wrong because an arbitrator orders it. That goes without saying; but that is not what is meant by those who would except from arbitration all vital questions, or questions affecting the honor of a country. It is not so easy to say what they do mean. To Montesquieu, who made so much of honor in his political philosophy, it is "le préjugé de chaque personne et de chaque condition"; preferences and distinctions created by classes and nations; a set of supreme, self-imposed duties; a code which says noblesse oblige, but which also claims to be a law unto itself. It is a code which in private life declares killing no murder, upholds against the law of the land duelling, and justifies in certain courts perjury; a code which, as Montesquieu justly says, is "naturellement sujet à des bizarreries" (III. Cap. X.). Those who use honor in this sense fight the same battle as those who would eliminate from arbitration questions of honor. Both resist the entrance of law into a region in which it was long a stranger. Both claim to be governed by a code of their ownor to be above any code. Long ago in civilized countries was fought out the question of the supremacy of law in the internal lives of nations. Much

the same contest now goes on between nations. In some circumstances municipal law may be justifiably broken in obedience to a higher law. In theory there may be like conflicts between a nation's duty to maintain peace and its duty to guard its honor. In fact, the appeal to honor is generally an appeal to the lower law.

It is worth while noting how many questions in which it was said national honor was involved have in fact been successfully settled by arbitration or by like means. The opposition to the arbitrations conducted under the Jay Treaty came from those who thought that the matters at issue affected the honor of the two countries. In the long dispute as to the Oregon boundary there was the same talk of honor. President Polk declared that "he did not believe the territorial rights of the nation to be a subject for arbitration." "All Oregon or none." "Fifty-four forty, or fight," was the popular cry. In the end the forty-ninth parallel was accepted with no loss of honor and dignity. The sticklers for the honor of this country pressed Lord Salisbury to meet President Cleveland's demand -for such it was-that England should submit to arbitration the dispute between her and Venezuela as to the boundary line of British Guiana. Lord Salisbury, who understood honor as well as any statesman, did not yield to this pressure. The matter was referred to arbitration, and resulted in a decision, on the whole, in favor of England. A famous American statesman once declared that he would as soon cut off his right hand, as agree to the contention of England with respect to the North American fisheries; a contention which his country lately submitted to The Hague Tribunal, with no loss of prestige or honor. In truth all the great arbitrations of the past, certainly the most successful, have turned upon questions which the liti

gants at one stage in the controversies declared involved vital interests and points of honor.

One remark as to the draft of the Anglo-American Treaty of Arbitration. It is proposed to refer certain questions to a Commission of Inquiry, which will The Contemporary Review.

report without deciding. It might have been better to treat all questions alike. But, at all events, the scheme provides for old international disputes what is so much needed, a refrigerating chamber in which heated passions may cool down.

John Macdonell.

Far away in an island in the Pacific, towards the end of his life, Louis Stevenson would sometimes shut his eyes and imagine himself at home again. With an almost passionate insistence his thoughts would go back to the Edinburgh he knew he would never see again--to the old houses and streets and gardens; the faces and voices of his youth. He had never loved Edinburgh over-well, and he had sometimes hated it; to him it had been a city of "icy winds and conventions," where he had spent his desultory boyhood, and what he himself has called "the wild and bitterly unhappy days of my youth." How often had he leaned over the North Bridge and looked down at the great railway station beneath it, and watched the trains disappearing into the tunnel, on their way to the sunny South! How often had he longed to be in one of those outgoing trains once and for all to shake the dust of Edinburgh from his feet; to cut himself free! And in those days there was nothing for it but to turn homeward, with his head bent against the wind, or perhaps to turn round by the Calton Hill and the dismal gaol, into the graveyard where David Hume lies buried the graveyard that was a particular haunt of Louis Stevenson's, where "in hot fits of youth I came to be unhappy." And then a day arrived when he was "ordered south"; and after that Edinburgh had never held him

long-he was always going away and coming back again. He had travelled far beyond the limits of those trains he had watched from the North Bridge -farther than most men. He had lived under many roofs, including the canopy of heaven. Like old Langland's Piers Plowman, he had gone "wide in this world," but not like him "wonders to hear"; for though he had, in those North Bridge moments, yearned after wonders, and though, whenever a "ferly" did befall him, there was no man could make more copy out of it than he, Louis Stevenson could manufacture his own wonders, wherever he was:

An' Fancy traivels far afield
To gaither a' that gairdens yield
O' sun an' Simmer:
To hearten up a dowie chield,
Fancy's the limmer!

His wanderings had been in search of health, or, rather-for he had early realized that health was denied himin search of climate; a climate in which a poor literary genius, who was also a very sick man, might go on living something that might be called Lifefor another decade or so. And at last he seemed to have found it. In his Samoan home, the Vailima of his Prayers and Letters, Louis Stevenson had surrounded himself with all that human love and devotion and intellectual sympathy could achieve: with sunshine, warmth, and brilliant colors, the

crimson-lake and prussian-blue he had loved from his childhood; and yet all these things would vanish, and in dreams he would see again a gray stone town-house in Heriot Row, a gray old manse in Colinton Dell, and a little gray stone cottage at the foot of the Pentland Hills.

These three houses are all extant, and wonderfully little changed in appearance, considering how cities grow and alter and overspread their boundaries nowadays. Heriot Row is still the same prosperous and dignified row of town houses that it was more than fifty years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson went to live at No. 17 with their little seven-year-old "Smout." It was, even then, half a century old, for it had been the earliest extension of the New Town, after the building of the three great streets-Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street-on the northern slopes of the city towards the Firth of Forth, and it was the beginning of what was then called the "Second New Town." Queen Street, facing north, looks down on Heriot Row, and Heriot Row, facing south, looks up at Queen Street; and between the two there is now a fine wide belt of public gardens, common to both. It is now in the centre of a city: roofs and spires and chimneys stretch away for miles, a blue-gray haze, in all directions. But Louis Stevenson's grandfather, the old minister of Colinton, liked to remember that he had played in the cornfields, and eaten strawberries and cream, on the very site of Heriot Row. Lord Cockburn and Jeffrey had stood in Queen Street on still nights and listened to the "ceaseless, rural corncrake, nesting happily in the dewy grass."

The first house to be built in Heriot Row-it was about the year 1802-was No. 13; and Robert Chambers, in his "Walks in Edinburgh,” says that the people of the "First New Town" con

sidered it "a mad speculation," and that the family who first lived in this house was regarded, even by the people living in Queen Street, just above it, as "out of the world." The Highland Lady, in her Memoirs, says that for a long time the land between Heriot Row and Queen Street was left as mere waste land, "unsightly grass," where, from Monday morning to Saturday night, the washerwomen of the town came to hang out their clothes to dry. This was the view from the drawingroom windows of Mackenzie, the "Man of Feeling," and Alison, the author of "Essays on Taste"!

About 1815, when the Grants of Rothiemurchus were living at No. 4 for an Edinburgh season, Mrs. Grant "wound up their gaieties" by giving a fashionable rout, which "made even more stir than was intended." For Mr. Grant, who was a Protectionist, had been up to London and voted on the Corn Law Bill, and on his return, on the very evening of his wife's party, the mob came down to Heriot Row. Stones rattled in at the windows, and angry voices rose above the hum of conversation and the strains of the music. Several of the ladies promptly fainted. The military arrived on the scene; the mob was dispersed by the dragoons, and a guard of soldiers left behind ate up all the supper that had been prepared for the guests, besides a round of beef that was "fortunately found in the larder."

Not till about 1830 was the "unsightly grass" railed in and planted; and so delighted were the inhabitants of Heriot Row with their new gardens that "evening fêtes" began to be held there. Lanterns were hung among the trees and flowers, and "festive groups of ladies" might be seen (through the railings) "passing lightly to and fro." Robert Chambers, writing at the time, certifies that it was all highly respectable: "a degree of harmony and free

dom," he says, "has hitherto characterized every such occasion." How long the inhabitants of Heriot Row continued these high jinks, and what ultimately put an end to them, is not recorded; but when Thomas Stevenson took his house in 1857 things must have quieted down, and Heriot Row and its railed-in gardens must have looked pretty much as they do to-day. It is probable that Mr. Stevenson, with his delicate wife and child, chose his house for its southern exposure. To this day the pavement in front of Heriot Row is one of the sunniest walks in Edinburgh.

No. 17 looks very much as it did when the Stevensons lived there; and it must be remembered that they lived there for thirty years, and that this was Louis Stevenson's home from childhood to manhood. The house was given up only after his father's death in 1887, when Louis Stevenson said good-bye to Edinburgh for the last time, and Mrs. Stevenson, shutting the door of her old home behind her, followed her son to the ends of the earth.

There is the nursery window, looking out over the gardens to Queen Street above! How often in those "terrible long nights," when the child could not sleep for coughing, has "Cummy" lifted him in her arms and carried him to that window to look out into the darkness, across the dark belt of gardens, at Queen Street, all dark, too, save where here and there a little light shone out in some high-up window; and "they would tell each other" that perhaps some other little sleepless child was there, in its nurse's arms, waiting for morning and for the sounds of the carts coming in.

Poor little idol! This was your Temple; you never had such another! Here in this house it was that every little word and act of yours was recorded in a young mother's diary. "My jewelest of mothers," you call her, in one of

your first letters to her. Here your father, the "man of somewhat antique strain," stood outside your nursery door, with pencil and paper, to take down your little "songstries," composed and crooned to yourself in your child's bed. As for the devotion of Alison Cunningham, the whole world knows it: "my second mother, my first wife." Louis Stevenson has been dead sixteen years; but "Cummy" is living still in Edinburgh, sole survivor now of that little Heriot Row world of four.

The lamp-post is still in front of No. 17:

For we are very lucky with a lamp before the door,

And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more.

All Scottish children, in those old days of the ladder and the lantern, knew the refrain "Leerie, Leerie, licht the lamp"; but it is to be doubted if ever a child of them expended the passionate human interest on any Leerie of his acquaintance that little "Smout" did on that lamplighter of Heriot Row. There is the window where, in the dusk of the winter afternoons, about the time the nursery tea was getting ready, he would take up his position to watch for the lamplighter as he came hurrying up the street with his ladder and lantern. Even then the little fellow was a Bohemian: even then he was looking forward to a day

when I am stronger, and can choose what I'm to do,

O Leerie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!

And is there anything more touching in child literature than that appeal, from the monotonous safety of a nursery window?—

And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,

O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him good-night!

Louis Stevenson always remembered, with a kind of melancholy disgust,

the walks he used to take with his nurse, when he was a child, in the streets of Edinburgh: the "trite streetcorners, commonplace, well-to-do houses, shabby suburban tanfields, and rainy beggarly slums," which, as a small boy, walking at “Cummy's" side, "gaping on the universe," he had "taken in at a gulp."

Had he but known it, he was never to be well, and seldom really happy, in this city of his birth-Burns's "Scotia's darling seat" and Scott's "mine own romantic town!" He was to rail at her, to weary of her, to leave her; and yet, in those days long afterwards, when he shut his eyes and imagined himself at home again, how did he remember her?

.

.

I can still behold the profile of her towers and chimneys, and the long trail of her smoke against the sunset; I can still hear those strains of martial music that she goes to bed with, ending each day, like an act of an opera, to the notes of bugles; the august airs of the castle on its rock, nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendors of the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was received into a sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and upwards, by fresh grades and rises, city beyond city, a New Jerusalem, bodily scaling heaven.

But cities, except in remembrance, never suited Louis Stevenson. His child's paradise was the manse at Colinton, where his grandfather, old Dr. Balfour, was parish minister. In those days there was no suburban railway-line winding through Colinton Dell by the side of the Water of Leith. Whenever "Master Lou" paid his visits to the manse (and he was very often there) he travelled with all the dignity of pre-railway days, in the dear old manse phaeton. His grandfather,

with his silver hair and beautiful old face-a face that his children inherited -was an object of reverence and awe to his grandchildren, who gazed at him every Sunday in the pulpit, "the observed of all observers," and were sometimes allowed to sit with him over his nuts and port, but who at other times saw little of him; for he spent most of his time alone in the study among his "bloodless books," writing his sermons, and letters to his children who were scattered over the earth. The management of all things under the manse roof devolved on his unmarried daughter, the "Aunt Jane" of the Balfour family. Aunt Janethe "Chief of Aunts"-was an altogether delightful and fascinating person. In her youth she had been "a wit and a beauty," but she had also been considered "very imperious, managing, and self-sufficient." As time went on, the Chief of Aunts settled down into the cleverest, kindest, and most comfortable member of her family; and the brothers and sisters, to whom she had seemed in the old days to be something of a "wilful empress," now sent home, from India and elsewhere, little batches of the second generation-sometimes with an ayah attached, and sometimes without-quite sure their children would be safe and

happy under Aunt Jane's wing. According to Louis Stevenson, there must sometimes have been "half a score" of these young people at the manse. Small wonder that the old minister took refuge among his books! But the children were in paradise; and Louis Stevenson found himself, in Sir Sidney Colvin's happy phrase, "something of a small sickly prince" among these cousins. "This little country manse," wrote Louis Stevenson long afterwards, "was the centre of the world; and Aunt Jane represented Charity."

Off the long low dining-room of the manse opened a store-room that surely