The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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friend and comrade as well. She sang for him, danced for him, spun fine
tales of pirates and smugglers, and read to him so dramatically that his
mind was fired then and there with a longing for travel and adventure
which he never lost. When they took their walks through the streets
together Cummie had many stories to tell him of Scotland and Edinburgh
in the old days. For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with a wonderful
history full of tales of stirring adventure and romance. "For centuries
it was a capitol thatched with heather and more than once, in the evil
days of English invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, a beacon
to ships at sea.... It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not
only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were
fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal
presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords.... In
the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows'
nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat
James VI. would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the