nston Cottage]

These years saw great change in him; from a frank and happy child he had
grown into a lonely, moody boy making few friends and shunning the
social life that his father's position in Edinburgh offered him. He
describes himself as a "lean, ugly, unpopular student," but those who
knew him never applied the term "ugly" to him at any time.

At Swanston he explored the hills alone and grew to know them so well
that the Pentland country ever remained vividly in his memory and found
its way into many of his stories, notably "St. Ives," where he describes
Swanston as it was when they first made it their summer home.

Many solitary winter evenings he spent there rereading his favorite
novels, particularly Dumas's "Vicomte de Bragelonne," which always
pleased him. "Shakespeare has served me best," he said. "Few living
friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or
Rosalind. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is
D'Artagnan, the elderly D'Artagnan of the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne.'

"I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
shepherd, a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, and I would sit down
with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
fire."

At Swanston he first began to really write, "bad poetry," he says, and
during his solitary rambles fought with certain problems that perplexed
him.

Here he made the acquaintance of the Scotch gardener, Robert Young, and
John Todd, the "Roaring Shepherd, the oldest herd on the Pentlands,"
whom he accompanied on his rounds with the sheep, listening to his tales
told in broad Scotch of the highland shepherds in the old days when "he
himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides
with his caravan; and by his account it was rough business not without
danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drivers met in
the wilderness, as to-day the deep sea fishers meet off the banks in the
solitude of the Atlantic."

All this time Louis was idling through the university, knowing that in
the end he would make nothing of himself as an engineer and dreading to
confess it to his father. At length, however, his failure in his studies
came to Thomas Stevenson's attention, and, on being questioned about it
"one dreadful day" as they were walking together, the boy frankly
admitted that his heart was not