United States or Russia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was indeed high time I should be gone from Swanston; but what I was to do in the meanwhile was another question. Rowley had received his orders last night: he was to say that I had met a friend, and Mrs. McRankine was not to expect me before morning. A good enough tale in itself; but the dreadful pickle I was in made it out of the question.
But the boy had been away only 21 months, and he returned to find his mother dead, and two or three little brothers and sisters dead and buried, and his father married again to his mother's cousin, Katherine Swanston, an old maid of 45, who, however, two years afterwards was the mother of a fine big daughter, so that Aunt Helen Park's scheme for getting the money for her sister's children failed.
That is Swanston Cottage, where my brother and I are living with my aunt. If it gives you pleasure to see it, I am glad. We, too, can see the castle from a corner in the garden, and we go there in the morning often do we not, Ronald? and we think of you, M. de Saint-Yves; but I am afraid it does not altogether make us glad.
And yet so impatient that when we galloped over the Calton Hill and down into Edinburgh by the new London road, with the wind in our faces, and a sense of April in it, brisk and jolly, I must pack off Rowley to our lodgings with the valises, and stay only for a wash and breakfast at Dumbreck's before posting on to Swanston alone.
In the heart of the city men were everywhere at work, laying gas and drain-pipes, macadamising, paving, kerbing: no longer would the old wives' tale be credited of the infant drowned in the deeps of Swanston Street, or of the bullock which sank, inch by inch, before its owner's eyes in the Elizabeth Street bog.
'Swanston was loading the JENNY, sir; and I stayed to serve out the article. 'True a work of necessity, and in the way of business. Does the JUMPING JENNY sail this tide? 'Aye, aye, sir; she sails for' 'I did not ask you WHERE she sailed for, Job, said the old gentleman, interrupting him. 'I thank my Maker, I know nothing of their incomings or outgoings.
At Swanston he first began to really write, "bad poetry," he says, and during his solitary rambles fought with certain problems that perplexed him.
And really the tears ran down his face as if he had been a truant school-laddie that had been chastised by his master. "'There is no occasion for thanks, Mr Swanston, said I 'none in the world; for the man would be worse than a heathen, that wouldna be ready to do ten times more.
There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability."
Discipline, remember!" for he was preparing to leap out of bed there and then "You can serve me better in Edinburgh. All you have to do is to wait for a clear coast, and seek and present yourself in private before Mr. T. Robbie of Castle Street, or Miss Flora Gilchrist of Swanston Cottage. From either or both of these you will take your instructions. Here are the addresses."
Word Of The Day