Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 3, 1895 - Travels and Excursions, Volume II

TOILS AND PLEASURES
Our nights were never cold, and they were always
still, but for one remarkable exception. Regularly,
about nine o'clock, a warm wind sprang up, and
blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an
hour, right down the canon, fanning it well out,
airing it as a mother airs the night-nursery before
the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the
clear darkness of the night, this wind was purely
local : perhaps dependent on the configuration of
the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the
hot and weary squatters ; and if we were not abed
already, the springing up of this Lilliputian valley-
wind would often be our signal to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the
first to rise. Many a night I have strolled about
the platform, taking a bath of darkness before I
slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from
the forge I could hear them talking together from
bunk to bunk. A single candle in the neck of a
pint bottle was their only illumination ; and yet
the old cracked house seemed literally bursting
with the light. It shone keen as a knife through all
the vertical chinks ; it struck upward through the
broken shingles ; and through the eastern door and
window it fell in a great splash upon the thicket
and the overhanging rock. You would have said
a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge ; and
behold it was but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet
more strange to see the procession moving bedwards
round the corner of the house, and up the plank
that brought us to the bedroom door; under the
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