1. I rang you up last night but I couldn't get you on the phone. 2. I had no change about me, so I couldn't take a bus and had to walk to the office. 3. We couldn't start the loading because the holds were not clean. 4. We did our best to avoid the damage but we couldn't. 5. We had to wait for the train rather long. 6. We didn't need to buy any provisions at our last port of call as we had everything in our store room. 7. He couldn't tell you about it as he didn’t see you yesterday. 8. He caught a bad cold and had to stay at home for a fortnight. 9. The work wasn't easy and needed to be done quickly. 10. They knew there was a trouble with the engine but couldn't locate it. 11. They didn't need to shift to another berth as there was no reason for it. 12. Do you have to take a pilot to enter the port?
Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The boy was often ill and during the cold winters stayed in the house. He had no brothers or sisters. Books were his only friends. Robert read very much. He thought about other countries and drew maps of different places which he wanted to see. The boy wrote stories of adventures on the sea and told those stories to his parents. In summer when Robert was not ill, he travelled with his father over Scotland. He saw storms on the sea and described those storms in his stories. At school he began to write stories and poems and wanted to be a writer, but his father was an engineer and wanted his son to be an engineer too. He said that writing poems and stories was only a hobby, not a profession. Stevenson went to the Edinburgh university for some time, then he travelled in different countries and wrote many stories. In 1883 Stevenson published his book “Treasure Island”. Readers liked the book very much. In 1886 Stevenson published his book “Kidnapped”. Then other books of adventures came out. People in many countries read and still read Stevenson’s stories. The hobby of a small boy was now his profession. But the writer was very ill and he died in 1894.
