l for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie."

On his return to Scotland the spell of his own land fell upon R.L.S. for
the first time. He realized now how he loved it spite of its bad
climate, how much there was at home waiting for him. "After all," he
said, "new countries, sun, music, and all the rest, can never take down
our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place it has
been making for itself in the bottom of my soul."

But he had returned only to be banished. The doctors found his lungs
too weak to risk Edinburgh winters and advised him to try the Alps.

Accordingly a cottage was rented in Davos Platz, a health resort. There
and at similar places near by they spent the next few winters with
visits to England and France between. Switzerland never suited
Stevenson. He disliked living among invalids, and with his love for
exploring the nooks and corners of any spot he was in he felt like a
prisoner when he found himself shut in a valley among continual snow
with few walks possible for him to take. "The mountains are about me
like a trap," he complained. "You can not foot it up a hillside and
behold the sea on a great plain, but live in holes and corners and can
change only one for the other."

Tobogganing was the only sport of Davos Platz he really enjoyed, and he
pursued that to his heart's content. "Perhaps the true way to toboggan
is alone and at night," he said. "First comes the tedious climb
dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing space, alone
with the snow and pine woods, cold, silent and solemn to the heart. Then
you push off; the toboggan fetches away, she begins to feel the hill, to
glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the
pine-trees and the whole heaven full of stars reels and flashes
overhead."

He accomplished little work at this time. Sometimes for days he would be
unable to write at all. But the little boy who had once told his mother,
"I have been trying to make myself happy," was the same man now who
could say: "I was never bored in my life." When unable to do anything
else he would build houses of cards or lie in bed and model little
figures in clay. Anything to keep his hands busy and his mind distracted
from the stories that crowded his brain and he had not strength to put
on paper. His one horror, the fear that urged him on to work feverishly
when he was suffering almost beyond endurance, was the thou