Throughout his life Stevenson scanned experience with reverted eyes. His passion for the past captured his attention so that he often stared at the present through the glass of memory. As if still studying the stationer's window where, on Saturday mornings, he and his nurse Cummy attempted to read, through the pictures, the “forbidden” sequels to the stories in Cassell's Family Papers, Stevenson at a later time continued to recapture and sometimes extend the “golden moments” and places of his youth by looking at the remembered images displayed within his mind's eye. These pictures brought him closer to the life he had left behind. They helped him re-embody the absence and break the silence of the glass that stood between him and his earlier years. Consequently, the recalled sight of Tibby Birse, a seamstress who had once come to the Edinburgh house and sewn with Cummy, “sitting with her legs crossed in a masculine manner; and swinging her foot emphatically” made audible the “thin, perpetual shrill” voice of her gossiping (Colvin 4: 264–65) and thereby, nearly forty years later (7 December 1893), breathed life into a detail and resuscitated a moment belonging to an earlier time.