Robert Louis Stevenson

The Merry Men Robert Louis Stevenson

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock. Butan uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had marrieda young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died ingiving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. It brought him innothing but the means of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued;he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; andremained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, andbrought neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands; there islittle luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he oneof the last to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student ofEdinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when somenews of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man whoheld blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me tocount Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was thatnow, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July day