It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself."
He started several magazines in his boyhood. The earlier ones were in manuscript, but illustrated, and the later ones in print. Their contents were generally hair-raising tales of adventure. Altogether, it would be hard to find a better instance of a man's bent showing itself all through his life.
It had been understood in the family that Louis—as his friends always called him—should follow his father's profession, engineering. Accordingly, when he entered the University of Edinburgh, he chose his course with this in view. At various times he went with his father or alone to acquaint himself with the practical side of the profession. What he thought of these experiences he tells us in his usual interesting way:
"As a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) of the miserable life of cities; and when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office. From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his longsighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other."
But, though Stevenson was never the man to shirk drudgery, "genuine life" lay for him in another field of work. The call to write was as strong in him as ever. And s0, in 1871, he decided
