The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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"I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
shepherd, a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, and I would sit down
with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
fire."

At Swanston he first began to really write, "bad poetry," he says, and
during his solitary rambles fought with certain problems that perplexed
him.

Here he made the acquaintance of the Scotch gardener, Robert Young, and
John Todd, the "Roaring Shepherd, the oldest herd on the Pentlands,"
whom he accompanied on his rounds with the sheep, listening to his tales
told in broad Scotch of the highland shepherds in the old days when "he
himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides
with his caravan; and by his account it was rough business not without
danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drivers met in