up,
Till it could come no more,'

while wetter and wetter grew the heroic few who, with Mr Stevenson 'sat
it out' loyally, till it was possible to sit there no longer. Then
wet--wetter indeed than ever before--the remnant crept home to be
frowned upon and punished but to know no repentance; for had not Robert
Louis been the ringleader, and was there any punishment invented that
could take from the joy and the pride of a mischievous adventure in
which _he_ had had a part! And he, with the water dripping from his
trousers and 'squirching' in his boots, was perfectly and placidly
happy, regardless of his aunt's dismay and the future horrors of a
possible bad cold. He had been a schoolboy again for the all too brief
half hour beside the grey and gurly sea, and that youthfulness, that
survived through all the patient suffering of his life and that seems to
laugh out of the pages of his books to the last, was in the ascendant as
he walked off jauntily townwards, amiably oblivious of the lecture his
aunt gave him by the way.

Anything which brought him into close contact with the sea had a charm
for him, even that mock combat with the waves of the autumn equinox on
the flat shore of Fife. Therefore at this time although classes and
study were a weariness to him his days spent in the old-fashioned town
of Anstruther, or on the desolate coast of Caithness, had many
pleasures; had many romances also, for everywhere he went he picked up
odd and out-of-the-way knowledge, and came across strange stories and
stranger characters, from the lingering tradition of the poor relic of
the Spanish Armada, the Duke of Modena Sidonia,[3] who after his sojourn
in Fair Isle landed at Anstruther and still glorified the quaint
sea-port in the East Neuk with his ghostly dignity--to the peer of the
realm, in actual flesh and blood, whom Mr Stevenson found acting as a
home missionary to the present day population of the Fair Isle. All
things were treasured in the note-book of his memory, or jotted down in
the note-book in his pocket; and, while the engineer progressed very
little in his profession, the future novelist was undergoing a training
for his work almost perfect in its way and assuredly most admirably
suited to the nature that loved an open air life and revelled in an
existence on the sea or beside it.'

Possibly not all aspiring civil engineers, certainly very few budding
novelists, so test the reality of things as to go down into