It is pleasanter to think of Stevenson playing the truant from the University, in his country haunts amid whins and whimsies, than of his facing a “downright meteorological purgatory” in the “draughty parallelograms” of the city. Every inch of the Pentlands, of Blackford Hill, of the Braids, of “classic Hawthornden” and all the valley of the Esk, of the windings of the Water of Leith and of the shores of the Firth of Forth--all of it was known to the youthful Stevenson, known so well and so faithfully that he could describe it afterwards from the Tropics. But especially dear and homelike must the Pentlands have been to him--the Pentlands, where the old manse of his boyish holidays lies, and where “Little Swanston” of his later years still nestles in the trees beside one of the most picturesque villages in Scotland, within half-an-hour’s walk from Edinburgh. All the ground between Colinton and Swanston is historic. Had the countryside kept a diary, the first leaves would have been inscribed in Roman characters; for here was once a Roman town, though all that now remains of the conquering race of the old world is a little Roman bridge, and the great unhewn Battlestone standing huge and awesome alone in a field, and telling of the battle fought here, centuries ago, between the Picts and the Romans. A few hundreds of pages farther on in the diary would come the stern words of the persecuted Covenanters, who were encamped near here before the battle of Rullion Green. All this romance and lore was known to Stevenson and loved by him, as well as he knew and loved the cry of the sea-gulls as they circled overhead, or followed the plough with loud cries of hunger. Often must the young Stevenson, with his strange face and long hair and his eccentric garb, have climbed the steep hill road, past “Hunter’s Tryst,” five hundred feet above sea-level, where, it is told, Allan Ramsay laid the scenery of the _Gentle Shepherd_,[66] and where the members of the Six Feet Club used to meet in the little roadside inn which Sir Walter Scott and the Ettrick Shepherd both knew well. The quiet cart-road to Swanston leads out of this road, a little beyond the sharp turn at “Hunter’s Tryst,” and before the [Illustration: ARTHUR’S SEAT FROM THE BRAID HILLS In the immediate foreground is a portion of the Braid Hills; farther on the Blackford Hill with the shelter on its highest point, and at the end of the slope to the right the New Royal Observatory. To the left are part of Edinburgh, the mass of the Castle, and the shores of Fife. The Salisbury Crags and “Lion” of Arthur’s Seat are above all.]