Robert Louis Stevenson so many irons in the fire". He wrote "The Beach of Falesa", "Catriona" (titled "David Balfour" in the US), "The Ebb-Tide", and the "Vailima Letters" during this period. Stevenson grew depressed and wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein, as he had been "overworked bitterly" and that the best he could write was "ditch-water". He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to
Lewis Balfour who married the lighthouse engineer Thomas Stevenson and together were parents to the world-famous author Robert Louis Stevenson. The latter was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, after his grandfather, but Lewis was changed to Louis to make it sound more French, and Balfour was dropped altogether. Their daughter Henrietta Louisa Balfour (1822-1853) married R. H. Traquair, uncle of Ramsay Heatley Traquair. Their son Lewis Balfour (1817-1870) was a merchant in Calcutta. Mackintosh Balfour (1825-1894) was a manager in the Bank of Bombay. Stevenson's book; A Child's Garden of Verses remembers his summers at Colinton manse. The 1851 census has two