Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 1, 1894 - Miscellanies, Volume I

ADDITIONAL MEMORIES
tions, in the popular literature of the time, go hand
in hand ; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing
quite by itself, and in the proper phrase, a manifest
judgment. He had been at a friend's house in
Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I suspect)
he had partaken of the bottle ; indeed, to put the
thing in our cold modern way, the reverend gentle-
man was on the brink of delirium tremens. It was a
dark night, it seems ; a little lassie came carrying a
lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they
went down the street of Anstruther Wester, the
lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand, the barred
lustre tossing up and down along the front of slum-
bering houses, and Mr. Thomson not altogether
steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his
mind. The pair had reached the middle of the
bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler
started in some baseless fear and looked behind him ;
the child, already shaken by the minister's strange
behaviour, started also ; in so doing she would jerk
the lantern ; and for the space of a moment the
hghts and the shadows would be all confounded.
Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the
twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to
sweep down, to pass them close by as they stood
upon the bridge, and to vanish on the farther side in
the general darkness of the night. ' Plainly the devil
come for Mr. Thomson !' thought the child. What
Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of
knowledge ; but he fell upon his knees in the midst
of the bridge like a man praying. On the rest of
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