The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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At home and at his last school he was always starting magazines. The
stories were illustrated with much color and the magazines circulated
among the boys for a penny a reading. One was called _The Sunbeam
Magazine_, an illustrated miscellany of fact, fiction, and fun, and
another _The School Boy Magazine_. The latter contained four stories and
its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their
fill of horrors--"regular crawlers," Louis called them. In the first
tale, "The Adventures of Jan Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a
boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is a "Ghost Story" of
robbers in a deserted castle.... The third is called, "by curious
anticipation of a story he was to write later on, 'The Wreckers.'"

Numerous plays and novels he began but they eventually found their fate
in the trash basket. An exception to this was a small green pamphlet of
twenty pages called "The Pentland Rising, a page of history, 1666." It
was published through his father's interest on the two-hundredth
anniversary of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in Scotland's