The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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history had been impressed on his mind by the numerous stories. Cummie
had told him of the Covenanters and the fact that they had spent the
night before their defeat in the town of Colinton.

From the time he was a little chap, balancing on the limb of an
apple-tree in the Colinton garden trying to see what kind of a world
lay beyond the garden wall, Louis had had a longing to travel and see
sights. This began to find satisfaction now.

His father took him on a trip around the coast of Fife, visiting the
harbor lights. The little towns along the coast were already familiar to
him by the stories of the past. Dunfermline, where, according to the
ballad, Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drinking blood-red wine";
Kerkcaldy, where the witches used to sink "tall ships and honest
mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss with its bat-haunted caves,
where the Chevalier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden passed a night
of superstitious terrors."