The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

Back Forward Menu

resentment, and yet his rule was not more thorough than it was
beneficent. His thought for the keepers was continual.... When a keeper
was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
ship.... They dwelt, many of them, in uninhabited isles or desert
forelands, totally cut off from shops.

"No servant of the Northern Lights came to Edinburgh but he was
entertained at Baxter Place. There at his own table my grandfather sat
down delightedly with his broad-spoken, homespun officers."

As he grew old his "medicine and delight" was his annual trip among his
lighthouses, but at length there came a time when this joy was taken
away from him and there came "the end of all his cruising; the knowledge
that he had looked the last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and
the Sound of Mull; that he was never again to hear the surf break in
Clashcarnock; never again to see lighthouse after lighthouse (all
younger than himself, and the more, part of his own device) open in the