Robert Louis Stevenson long afterwards put into verse in his "Songs of Travel":
"The untented Kosmos my abode
I go, a wilful stranger,
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of Danger."
But no man-of-war life for him. He booked his passage in a barque sailing for Liverpool, resolved to see something of life in the Old World.
When he landed in the big city he "made himself flash," to use his own expression, and went the pace with a few like-minded young fellows, and one way and another his stock of cash soon vanished, and he found himself stranded, friendless, and alone—his companions of the "flush" times had no more use for him. One day, as he wandered disconsolate along the streets, his eye was taken by the scarlet tunic and lively bearing of a smart recruiting-sergeant, and on the impulse of the moment he took the Queen's shilling and was enlisted in Her Majesty's 57th Regiment of Foot. This was in the year 1859.
The young Eastport sailor soon bitterly regretted the day that his eye was dazzled by the Queen's scarlet. The British Army was less to his taste than life in Uncle Sam's Navy. He was sent to Cork with a draft of two hundred other recruits, and the interminable drill soon gave him an intense disgust for the routine of barrack-yard instruction.
