And now admire the finger of predestination. There
was a schoolboy in the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage, home
from the holidays, and much in want of 'something craggy to
break his mind upon.' He had no thought of literature; it
was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages;
and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water
colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture
gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to
be showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the
artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon
with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings.
On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it
was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the
shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the
unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance
'Treasure Island.' I am told there are people who do not
care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the
shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers,
the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable
up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and
the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE
on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for
any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to
understand with! No child but must remember laying his head
in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and
seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
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