Explore "The Education of an Engineer" by Robert Louis Stevenson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays, 1892.
Anstruther is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a considerable extent) Tennant's vernacular poem "Anst'er Fair"; and I have there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string-course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.