A Child Waits for the Morning

As a young boy, Robert Louis Stevenson experienced many fevered nights in his house at Number 17 Heriot Row:

“Nothing but lamps the whole town through and never a child awake but you.

If anyone should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it should be I.  I remember so long ago, the sickly child that woke from his hours slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie awake and listen, and long for the first signs of life among the silent streets.

Over the black belt of the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a lighted window.  It was my custom as the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, “When will the carts come in?” and repeat it again and again.

The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts. They were the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day.  You can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses, or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh, horse laughter comes up to you through the darkness.

Here is now an end to mystery and fear.”