ILLUSTRATIONS

Robert Louis Stevenson Frontispiece
  From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne
          
                                              facing
          
                                               page

No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson’s birthplace 18

Colinton Manse 26

Swanston Cottage 42

Edinburgh Castle 64

Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth 98

The Treasure Island map 100

Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with “An Inland Voyage” 106

Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens 112

South Sea houses 130

The house at Vailima 154

A feast of chiefs 162

The tomb of Stevenson on Vaea Mountain 172

Thelife of

RobertLouis Stevenson

Forboys and girls

“Write me as one who loves his fellowmen.” 
—­Hunt.

CHAPTER I

THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS

“...  For the sake Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen, Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled To plant a star for seamen.”

The pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend tells, while cruising off the coast of Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank the warning bell on one of the great rocks, to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who had put it there.  The following year the Rover returned and perished himself on the same rock.

In the life of one of Scotland’s great men, Robert Louis Stevenson, we find proud record of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, having built Bell Rock Lighthouse on this same spot years afterward.

No story of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life would be complete that failed to mention the work done for Scotland and the world at large by the two men he held most dear, the engineers, his father and grandfather.

When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, received his appointment on the Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had just begun.  Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger, and few mariners cared to venture around them.  At that time the coast “was lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an open chaufer.  The whole archipelago thus nightly plunged in darkness was shunned by seagoing vessels.” [Footnote:  Stevenson, “Family of Engineers.”]