Introduction. There was a sound above my head

There was a sound above my head. I jumped and looked up — at an old gun, at one of the windows.

'I — I'm here with a letter,' I said. 'A letter for Mr Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws. Is he here?'

'Put it down outside the door, and go away,' said the man with the gun.

After his parents die, young David Balfour starts his journey to the strange House of Shaws. He is going to live with his uncle. But people look strangely at him when he talks about the place. ' Stay away from there. Stay away!' a man on the road tells him.

Ebenezer Balfour is an old man, but he is dangerous. He puts David on a ship to America, and a difficult time begins. Can the man in expensive French clothes help David? Or is life more dangerous with him than without him?

At the time of this story, King George was the king of England, Scotland and Ireland, but there were a lot of unhappy people in Scotland and Ireland. They wanted another Catholic king from the Stuart family (Stewart in this story).They fought the king's soldiers, but they lost. After the fight at Culloden, in 1746, Charles Edward Stuart had to leave Scotland. This story begins five years later.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in Scotland in 1850. He was a weak child and he was ill for most of his life. He went on long journeys and in 1888 he moved to Samoa, a warm country, with his American wife. He died there in 1894. His most famous books are Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped. They are all Penguin Readers.