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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: 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 ever he had one) for 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 long-sighted 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
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