Records of a Family of Engineers
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON

I.  DOMESTIC ANNALS
II. THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
III. THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK

RECORDS OF
A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS

INTRODUCTION

THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON

FROM the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the
various disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne,
Stenesone, and Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the
mouth of the Firth of Forth to the mouth of the Firth of
Clyde. Four times at least it occurs as a place-name. There
is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second place of the
name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne,
above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain
Law. Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to
Edward I in 1296, and the last of that family died after the
Restoration. Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode
in the Bishops' Raid of Aberlady, served as jurors, stood bail
for neighbours - Hunter of Polwood, for instance - and became
extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier. A
Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows,
give their names, and vanish. And by the year 1700 it does
not appear that any acre of Scots land was vested in any
Stevenson. (1)

(1) An error: Stevensons owned at this date the barony of
Dolphingston in Haddingtonshire, Montgrennan in Ayrshire, and
several other lesser places.

Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward
progress, and a family posting towards extinction. But the
law (however administered, and I am bound to aver that, in
Scotland, `it couldna weel be waur') acts as a kind of dredge,
and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the light
of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the
gallows, the creeping things of the past. By these broken
glimpses we are able to trace the existence of many other and
more inglorious Stevensons, picking a private way through the
brawl that makes Scots history. They were members of
Parliament for Peebles, Stirling, Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and
Inverurie. We find them burgesses of Edinburgh; indwellers in
Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith. Thomas was the forester of
Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a
chirurgeon, and `Schir William' a priest. In the feuds of
Humes and Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures,
Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we find them inconspicuously
involved, and apparently getting rather better than they gave.
Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie slaughtered on
the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James ('in the mill-town of
Roberton'), murdered in 1590; Archibald ('in Gallowfarren'),
killed with shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608. Three
violent deaths in about seventy years, against which we can
only put the case of Thomas, servant to Hume of Cowden Knowes,
who was arraigned with his two young masters for the death of
the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569. John ('in Dalkeith')
stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords were
despatching Rizzio within. William, at the ringing of Perth
bell, ran before Gowrie House `with ane sword, and, entering
to the yearde, saw George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit
sword and utheris nychtbouris; at quilk time James Boig cryit
ower ane wynds, "Awa hame! ye will all be hangit" ' - a piece
of advice which William took, and immediately 'depairtit.'
John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly
deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for
infanticide, June 1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith,
eternally disgraced the name by signing witness in a witch
trial, 1661. These are two of our black sheep. (1)  Under the
Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and
another the lessee of the Canonmills. There were at the same
period two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom,
Dr. Archibald, appears to have been a famous man in his day
and generation. The Court had continual need of him; it was
he who reported, for instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he
was for some time in the enjoyment of a pension of a thousand
pounds Scots (about eighty pounds sterling) at a time when
five hundred pounds is described as 'an opulent future.'  I do
not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to keep
favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year's
present) his pension was expunged. (2)  There need be no
doubt, at least, of my exultation at the fact that he was
knighted and recorded arms. Not quite so genteel, but still
in public life, Hugh was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and
liked being so extremely. I gather this from his conduct in
September 1681, when, with all the lords and their servants,
he took the woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it 'word
by word upon his knees.'  And, behold! it was in vain, for
Hugh was turned out of his small post in 1684. (3)  Sir
Archibald and Hugh were both plainly inclined to be trimmers;
but there was one witness of the name of Stevenson who held
high the banner of the Covenant - John, 'Land-Labourer, (4) in
the parish of Daily, in Carrick,' that `eminently pious man.'
He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself
disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with
fever; but the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within
him.

(1) Pitcairn's CRIMINAL TRIALS, at large. - [R. L. S.]
(2) Fountainhall's DECISIONS, vol. i. pp. 56, 132, 186,
204, 368.- [R. L. S.]
(3) IBID. pp. 158, 299. - [R. L. S.]
(4) Working farmer: Fr. LABOUREUR.

`I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods,
and with pleasure for His name's sake wandered in deserts and
in mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. I lay four
months in the coldest season of the year in a haystack in my
father's garden, and a whole February in the open fields not
far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice
from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near
to the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the
morning. Many nights have I lain with pleasure in the
churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow;
frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the glen,
near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.'  The visible band
of God protected and directed him. Dragoons were turned aside
from the bramble-bush where he lay hidden. Miracles were
performed for his behoof. `I got a horse and a woman to carry
the child, and came to the same mountain, where I wandered by
the mist before; it is commonly known by the name of
Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came on
a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child's
weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could
not divert her from it, so that she was ready to burst. When
we got to the top of the mountain, where the Lord had been
formerly kind to my soul in prayer, I looked round me for a
stone, and espying one, I went and brought it. When the woman
with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and asked what
I was going to do with it. I told her I was going to set it
up as my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that place, the
Lord had formerly helped, and I hoped would yet help. The
rain still continuing, the child weeping bitterly, I went to
prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but the child gave
over weeping, and when we got up from prayer, the rain was
pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were to go
there fell not one drop; the place not rained on was as big as
an ordinary avenue.'  And so great a saint was the natural
butt of Satan's persecutions. `I retired to the fields for
secret prayer about mid-night. When I went to pray I was much
straitened, and could not get one request, but "Lord pity,"
"Lord help"; this I came over frequently; at length the terror
of Satan fell on me in a high degree, and all I could say even
then was - "Lord help."  I continued in the duty for some
time, notwithstanding of this terror. At length I got up to
my feet, and the terror still increased; then the enemy took
me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me up by my arms. I
saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed to
throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it
might have brought a great reproach upon religion. (1)  But it
was otherwise ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that
danger. (2)

(1) This John Stevenson was not the only `witness' of the
name; other Stevensons were actually killed during the
persecutions, in the Glen of Trool, on Pentland, etc.; and it
is very possible that the author's own ancestor was one of the
mounted party embodied by Muir of Caldwell, only a day too
late for Pentland.
(2) Wodrow Society's SELECT BIOGRAPHIES, vol. ii.- [R. L.
S.]

On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent,
reputable folk, following honest trades - millers, maltsters,
and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley
Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an
orphan looking about him in the world for a potential
ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally
free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the
one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly
be more near than a collateral. It was on August 12, 1678,
that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill, and `took
the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was shining
on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and THE
CLERK WHO RAISED THE PSALMS, to witness that I did give myself
away to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to
be forgotten'; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct
ascendant was registered in Glasgow. So that I have been
pursuing ancestors too far down; and John the land-labourer is
debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies of my
house his RARE SOUL-STRENGTHENING AND COMFORTING CORDIAL. It
is the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of
the Canonmills, worthy man! and with that public character,
Hugh the Under-Clerk, and, more than all, with Sir Archibald,
the physician, who recorded arms. And I am reduced to a
family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the clean
and handsome little city on the Clyde.

The name has a certain air of being Norse. But the story
of Scottish nomenclature is confounded by a continual process
of translation and half-translation from the Gaelic which in
olden days may have been sometimes reversed. Roy becomes
Reid; Gow, Smith. A great Highland clan uses the name of
Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean in
Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby. And we find such
hybrids as Macalexander for Macallister. There is but one
rule to be deduced: that however uncompromisingly Saxon a name
may appear, you can never be sure it does not designate a
Celt. My great-grandfather wrote the name STEVENSON but
pronounced it STEENSON, after the fashion of the immortal
minstrel in REDGAUNTLET; and this elision of a medial
consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I
have come across no less than two Gaelic forms: JOHN
MACSTOPHANE CORDINERIUS IN CROSSRAGUEL, 1573, and WILLIAM
M'STEEN in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605. Stevenson, Steenson,
Macstophane, M'Steen: which is the original? which the
translation? Or were these separate creations of the
patronymic, some English, some Gaelic? The curiously compact
territory in which we find them seated - Ayr, Lanark, Peebles,
Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the Lothians - would seem to forbid
the supposition. (1)

(1) Though the districts here named are those in which
the name of Stevenson is most common, it is in point of fact
far more wide-spread than the text indicates, and occurs from
Dumfries and Berwickshire to Aberdeen and Orkney.

`STEVENSON - or according to tradition of one of the
proscribed of the clan MacGregor, who was born among the
willows or in a hill-side sheep-pen - "Son of my love," a
heraldic bar sinister, but history reveals a reason for the
birth among the willows far other than the sinister aspect of
the name': these are the dark words of Mr. Cosmo Innes; but
history or tradition, being interrogated, tells a somewhat
tangled tale. The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered
about 1858 by the Argyll Campbells, appears to have been the
original 'Son of my love'; and his more loyal clansmen took
the name to fight under. It may be supposed the story of
their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort
identified with the idea of opposition to the Campbells.
Twice afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and
1552, we find the Macgregors again banding themselves into a
sept of 'Sons of my love'; and when the great disaster fell on
them in 1603, the whole original legend reappears, and we have
the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born 'among the willows' of a
fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen again rallying
under the name of Stevenson. A story would not be told so
often unless it had some base in fact; nor (if there were no
bond at all between the Red Macgregors and the Stevensons)
would that extraneous and somewhat uncouth name be so much
repeated in the legends of the Children of the Mist.

But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging
correspondent, Mr. George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York,
to give an actual instance. His grandfather, great-
grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and great-great-great-
grandfather, all used the names of Macgregor and Stevenson as
occasion served; being perhaps Macgregor by night and
Stevenson by day. The great-great-great-grandfather was a
mighty man of his hands, marched with the clan in the 'Forty-
five, and returned with SPOLIA OPIMA in the shape of a sword,
which he had wrested from an officer in the retreat, and which
is in the possession of my correspondent to this day. His
great-grandson (the grandfather of my correspondent), being
converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher, discarded in
a moment his name, his old nature, and his political
principles, and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his
adherence to the Protestant Succession by baptising his next
son George. This George became the publisher and editor of
the WESLEYAN TIMES. His children were brought up in ignorance
of their Highland pedigree; and my correspondent was puzzled
to overhear his father speak of him as a true Macgregor, and
amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious
house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer. After he was
grown up and was better informed of his descent, `I frequently
asked my father,' he writes, `why he did not use the name of
Macgregor; his replies were significant, and give a picture of
the man: "It isn't a good METHODIST name. You can use it, but
it will do you no GOOD."  Yet the old gentleman, by way of
pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as "Colonel
Macgregor." '

Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the
name of Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of
Methodism, adopting it entirely. Doubtless a proscribed clan
could not be particular; they took a name as a man takes an
umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took Campbell, and his
son took Drummond. But this case is different; Stevenson was
not taken and left - it was consistently adhered to. It does
not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan
Alpin; but it does follow that some may be. And I cannot
conceal from myself the possibility that James Stevenson in
Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may have had a Highland
ALIAS upon his conscience and a claymore in his back parlour.

To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow
descended from a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews
in the service of one of the Cardinal Beatons. No details
were added. But the very name of France was so detested in my
family for three generations, that I am tempted to suppose
there may be something in it. (1)

(1) Mr. J. H. Stevenson is satisfied that these
speculations as to a possible Norse, Highland, or French
origin are vain. All we know about the engineer family is
that it was sprung from a stock of Westland Whigs settled in
the latter part of the seventeenth century in the parish of
Neilston, as mentioned at the beginning of the next chapter.
It may be noted that the Ayrshire parish of Stevenston, the
lands of which are said to have received the name in the
twelfth century, lies within thirteen miles south-west of this
place. The lands of Stevenson in Lanarkshire first mentioned
in the next century, in the Ragman Roll, lie within twenty
miles east.

CHAPTER I
DOMESTIC ANNALS

IT is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether
Carsewell, parish of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and
presumably a tenant farmer, married one Jean Keir; and in
1675, without doubt, there was born to these two a son Robert,
possibly a maltster in Glasgow. In 1710, Robert married, for
a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them,
in 1720, another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow. In
1742, Robert the second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she
called herself), by whom he had ten children, among whom were
Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan, born June 1752.

With these two brothers my story begins. Their deaths
were simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full.
Tradition whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an
islet near St. Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be
at the head of considerable interests in the West Indies,
which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when
others are still curveting a clerk's stool. My kinsman, Mr.
Stevenson of Stirling, has heard his father mention that there
had been `something romantic' about Alan's marriage: and,
alas! he has forgotten what. It was early at least. His wife
was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a builder in Glasgow, and
several times `Deacon of the Wrights': the date of the
marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when
Robert, the only child of the union, was born, the husband and
father had scarce passed, or had not yet attained, his
twentieth year. Here was a youth making haste to give
hostages to fortune. But this early scene of prosperity in
love and business was on the point of closing.

There hung in the house of this young family, and
successively in those of my grandfather and father, an oil
painting of a ship of many tons burthen. Doubtless the
brothers had an interest in the vessel; I was told she had
belonged to them outright; and the picture was preserved
through years of hardship, and remains to this day in the
possession of the family, the only memorial of my great-
grandsire Alan. It was on this ship that he sailed on his
last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by Hugh. An agent
had proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to be
told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one
island to another in an open boat, were exposed to the
pernicious dews of the tropics, and simultaneously struck
down. The dates and places of their deaths (now before me)
would seem to indicate a more scattered and prolonged pursuit:
Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in Tobago, within sight of
Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so far away as `Santt
Kittes,' in the Leeward Islands - both, says the family Bible,
`of a fiver'(!). The death of Hugh was probably announced by
Alan in a letter, to which we may refer the details of the
open boat and the dew. Thus, at least, in something like the
course of post, both were called away, the one twenty-five,
the other twenty-two; their brief generation became extinct,
their short-lived house fell with them; and `in these lawless
parts and lawless times' - the words are my grandfather's -
their property was stolen or became involved. Many years
later, I understand some small recovery to have been made; but
at the moment almost the whole means of the family seem to
have perished with the young merchants. On the 27th April,
eleven days after Hugh Stevenson, twenty-nine before Alan,
died David Lillie, the Deacon of the Wrights; so that mother
and son were orphaned in one month. Thus, from a few scraps
of paper bearing little beyond dates, we construct the
outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the cradle of Robert
Stevenson.

Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well
fitted to contend with poverty, and of a pious disposition,
which it is like that these misfortunes heated. Like so many
other widowed Scots-women, she vowed her son should wag his
head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to her
ambition. A charity school, and some time under a Mr.
M'Intyre, `a famous linguist,' were all she could afford in
the way of education to the would-be minister. He learned no
Greek; in one place he mentions that the Orations of Cicero
were his highest book in Latin; in another that he had
'delighted' in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never
have been scholarly. This appears to have been the whole of
his training previous to an event which changed his own
destiny and moulded that of his descendants - the second
marriage of his mother.

There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of
Thomas Smith. The Smith pedigree has been traced a little
more particularly than the Stevensons', with a similar dearth
of illustrious names. One character seems to have appeared,
indeed, for a moment at the wings of history: a skipper of
Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of
the 'Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour
while going on board his ship. With this exception, the
generations of the Smiths present no conceivable interest even
to a descendant; and Thomas, of Edinburgh, was the first to
issue from respectable obscurity. His father, a skipper out
of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea while Thomas was still
young. He seems to have owned a ship or two - whalers, I
suppose, or coasters - and to have been a member of the Dundee
Trinity House, whatever that implies. On his death the widow
remained in Broughty, and the son came to push his future in
Edinburgh. There is a story told of him in the family which I
repeat here because I shall have to tell later on a similar,
but more perfectly authenticated, experience of his stepson,
Robert Stevenson. Word reached Thomas that his mother was
unwell, and he prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow.
It was between two and three in the morning, and the early
northern daylight was already clear, when he awoke and beheld
the curtains at the bed-foot drawn aside and his mother appear
in the interval, smile upon him for a moment, and then vanish.
The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by his watch, and
arrived at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of her
death. The incident is at least curious in having happened to
such a person - as the tale is being told of him. In all
else, he appears as a man ardent, passionate, practical,
designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the
average. He founded a solid business in lamps and oils, and
was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
Company's Works - `a multifarious concern it was,' writes my
cousin, Professor Swan, `of tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-
founders, blacksmiths, and japanners.'  He was also, it seems,
a shipowner and underwriter. He built himself `a land' - Nos.
1 and 2 Baxter's Place, then no such unfashionable
neighbourhood - and died, leaving his only son in easy
circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters
portions of five thousand pounds and upwards. There is no
standard of success in life; but in one of its meanings, this
is to succeed.

In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly
characteristic of the time. A high Tory and patriot, a
captain - so I find it in my notes - of Edinburgh Spearmen,
and on duty in the Castle during the Muir and Palmer troubles,
he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword and a
somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved. The judge
who sat on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall
from the bench the OBITER DICTUM - `I never liked the French
all my days, but now I hate them.'  If Thomas Smith, the
Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have been tempted
to applaud. The people of that land were his abhorrence; he
loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end he fell
into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with
games of tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to
array and overset; but those who played with him must be upon
their guard, for if his side, which was always that of the
English against the French, should chance to be defeated,
there would be trouble in Baxter's Place. For these opinions
he may almost be said to have suffered. Baptised and brought
up in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious
scruple, joined the communion of the Baptists. Like other
Nonconformists, these were inclined to the Liberal side in
politics, and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte
as a deliverer. From the time of his joining the Spearmen,
Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his brethren
in the faith.  `They that take the sword shall perish with
the sword,' they told him; they gave him `no rest'; `his
position became intolerable'; it was plain he must choose
between his political and his religious tenets; and in the
last years of his life, about 1812, he returned to the Church
of his fathers.

August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when,
having designed a system of oil lights to take the place of
the primitive coal fires before in use, he was dubbed engineer
to the newly-formed Board of Northern Lighthouses. Not only
were his fortunes bettered by the appointment, but he was
introduced to a new and wider field for the exercise of his
abilities, and a new way of life highly agreeable to his
active constitution. He seems to have rejoiced in the long
journeys, and to have combined them with the practice of field
sports. `A tall, stout man coming ashore with his gun over
his arm' - so he was described to my father - the only
description that has come down to me by a light-keeper old in
the service. Nor did this change come alone. On the 9th July
of the same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second
time a widower. As he was still but thirty-three years old,
prospering in his affairs, newly advanced in the world, and
encumbered at the time with a family of children, five in
number, it was natural that he should entertain the notion of
another wife. Expeditious in business, he was no less so in
his choice; and it was not later than June 1787 - for my
grandfather is described as still in his fifteenth year - that
he married the widow of Alan Stevenson.

The perilous experiment of bringing together two families
for once succeeded. Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean
and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were
well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the
stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to have
found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith. It is,
perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the
tired woman must have done much to fashion girls who were
under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have stamped a
strong impression on the boy of fifteen. But the cleavage of
the family was too marked, the identity of character and
interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the
three women on the other, was too complete to have been the
result of influence alone. Particular bonds of union must
have pre-existed on each side. And there is no doubt that the
man and the boy met with common ambitions, and a common bent,
to the practice of that which had not so long before acquired
the name of civil engineering.

For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and
influential, was then a thing of yesterday. My grandfather
had an anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk
of Eldin, their common friend. Smeaton was asked by the Duke
of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a professional
purpose. He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough
travelling. `You can recommend some other fit person?' asked
the Duke. `No,' said Smeaton, `I'm sorry I can't.'  `What!'
cried the Duke, `a profession with only one man in it! Pray,
who taught you?'  `Why,' said Smeaton, `I believe I may say I
was self-taught, an't please your grace.'  Smeaton, at the
date of Thomas Smith's third marriage, was yet living; and as
the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the
instrument-maker's, the other was beginning to enter it by the
way of his trade. The engineer of to-day is confronted with a
library of acquired results; tables and formulae to the value
of folios full have been calculated and recorded; and the
student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the
pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was largely
unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face
of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the
mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and
adventures. It was not a science then - it was a living art;
and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of
its practitioners.

The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by
stepfather and stepson. It chanced that Thomas Smith was a
reformer; the superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors
over open fires of coal secured his appointment; and no sooner
had he set his hand to the task than the interest of that
employment mastered him. The vacant stage on which he was to
act, and where all had yet to be created - the greatness of
the difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted him -
would rouse a man of his disposition like a call to battle.
The lad introduced by marriage under his roof was of a
character to sympathise; the public usefulness of the service
would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
expedients stimulate his ingenuity. And there was another
attraction which, in the younger man at least, appealed to,
and perhaps first aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment
of romance: I mean the attraction of the life. The seas into
which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce
charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far
beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must
sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats;
he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-
track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes
plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was
continually enforced to the vicissitudes of outdoor life. The
joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of
woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned
strong in age, and at the approach of death his last yearning
was to renew these loved experiences. What he felt himself he
continued to attribute to all around him. And to this
supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost
pathetically, appealing; often in vain.

Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become
almost at once the eager confidant and adviser of his new
connection; the Church, if he had ever entertained the
prospect very warmly, faded from his view; and at the age of
nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority,
superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle
of Little Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde. The change of aim
seems to have caused or been accompanied by a change of
character. It sounds absurd to couple the name of my
grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had been
destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained
the age of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate
knowledge of Latin, was at least no unusual student. And from
the day of his charge at Little Cumbrae he steps before us
what he remained until the end, a man of the most zealous
industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern
husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of
self-improvement. Thenceforward his summers were spent
directing works and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in
half-savage islands; his winters were set apart, first at the
Andersonian Institution, then at the University of Edinburgh
to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry, natural history,
agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded student -
although no doubt scrupulously shaved. I find one reference
to his years in class which will have a meaning for all who
have studied in Scottish Universities. He mentions a
recommendation made by the professor of logic. `The high-
school men,' he writes, `and BEARDED MEN LIKE MYSELF, were all
attention.'  If my grandfather were throughout life a thought
too studious of the art of getting on, much must be forgiven
to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a
sense of difference, at `the high-school men.'  Here was a
gulf to be crossed; but already he could feel that he had made
a beginning, and that must have been a proud hour when he
devoted his earliest earnings to the repayment of the
charitable foundation in which he had received the rudiments
of knowledge.

In yet another way he followed the example of his father-
in-law, and from 1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell
Rock made it necessary for him to resign, he served in
different corps of volunteers. In the last of these he rose
to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the
Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his
resignation, entreated he would do them `the favour of
continuing as an honorary member of a corps which has been so
much indebted for your zeal and exertions.'

To very pious women the men of the house are apt to
appear worldly. The wife, as she puts on her new bonnet
before church, is apt to sigh over that assiduity which
enabled her husband to pay the milliner's bill. And in the
household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly.
Religious they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the
fragility and unreality of that scene in which we play our
uncomprehended parts; like all Scots, realising daily and
hourly the sense of another will than ours and a perpetual
direction in the affairs of life. But the current of their
endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel. They had got on
so far; to get on further was their next ambition - to gather
wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher
than themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of
families. Scott was in the same town nourishing similar
dreams. But in the eyes of the women these dreams would be
foolish and idolatrous.

I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to
Mrs. Smith and the two girls, her favourites, which depict in
a strong light their characters and the society in which they
moved.

`My very dear and much esteemed Friend,' writes one
correspondent, `this day being the anniversary of our
acquaintance, I feel inclined to address you; but where shall
I find words to express the fealings of a graitful HEART,
first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you on this day
last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially cast
in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . . Methinks I
shall hear him say unto you, "Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness
to my afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me." '

This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote
indifferently to Jean, to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she
calls `my Edinburgh mother.'  It is plain the three were as
one person, moving to acts of kindness, like the Graces,
inarmed. Too much stress must not be laid on the style of
this correspondence; Clarinda survived, not far away, and may
have met the ladies on the Calton Hill; and many of the
writers appear, underneath the conventions of the period, to
be genuinely moved. But what unpleasantly strikes a reader
is, that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in their
devotion. It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the
soft-hearted ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of
the correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and
imperfect spelling. When a midwife is recommended, not at all
for proficiency in her important art, but because she has `a
sister whom I [the correspondent] esteem and respect, and
[who] is a spiritual daughter of my Hond Father in the
Gosple,' the mask seems to be torn off, and the wages of
godliness appear too openly. Capacity is a secondary matter
in a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter,
and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law. Common
decency is at times forgot in the same page with the most
sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to a
correspondent who appears to have been at the time the
housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
grandmother in a season of distress. For nearly half a sheet
she keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in
language then suddenly breaks out:

`It was fully my intention to have left this at
Martinmass, but the Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation.
I have had more need of patience in my situation here than in
any other, partly from the very violent, unsteady, deceitful
temper of the Mistress of the Family, and also from the state
of the house. It was in a train of repair when I came here
two years ago, and is still in Confusion. There is above six
Thousand Pounds' worth of Furniture come from London to be put
up when the rooms are completely finished; and then, woe be to
the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!'

And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she
goes on to ask the bereaved family to seek her a new place.
It is extraordinary that people should have been so deceived
in so careless an impostor; that a few sprinkled `God
willings' should have blinded them to the essence of this
venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains
to bind it in with others (many of them highly touching) in
their memorial of harrowing days. But the good ladies were
without guile and without suspicion; they were victims marked
for the axe, and the religious impostors snuffed up the wind
as they drew near.

I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip
of the pen: for by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it
is hard not to suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean
Smith became the wife of Robert Stevenson. Mrs. Smith had
failed in her design to make her son a minister, and she saw
him daily more immersed in business and worldly ambition. One
thing remained that she might do: she might secure for him a
godly wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had
two under her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and
daughters both in law and love - Jean and Janet. Jean's
complexion was extremely pale, Janet's was florid; my
grandmother's nose was straight, my great-aunt's aquiline; but
by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to
distinguish one from other. The marriage of a man of twenty-
seven and a girl of twenty who have lived for twelve years as
brother and sister, is difficult to conceive. It took place,
however, and thus in 1799 the family was still further
cemented by the union of a representative of the male or
worldly element with one of the female and devout.

This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never
diminished the strength of their relation. My grandfather
pursued his design of advancing in the world with some measure
of success; rose to distinction in his calling, grew to be the
familiar of members of Parliament, judges of the Court of
Session, and `landed gentlemen'; learned a ready address, had
a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was referred
to as `a highly respectable BOURGEOIS,' resented the
description. My grandmother remained to the end devout and
unambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, and her
house; easily shocked, and associating largely with a clique
of godly parasites. I do not know if she called in the
midwife already referred to; but the principle on which that
lady was recommended, she accepted fully. The cook was a
godly woman, the butcher a Christian man, and the table
suffered. The scene has been often described to me of my
grandfather sawing with darkened countenance at some
indissoluble joint - `Preserve me, my dear, what kind of a
reedy, stringy beast is this?' - of the joint removed, the
pudding substituted and uncovered; and of my grandmother's
anxious glance and hasty, deprecatory comment, `Just
mismanaged!'  Yet with the invincible obstinacy of soft
natures, she would adhere to the godly woman and the Christian
man, or find others of the same kidney to replace them. One
of her confidants had once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old
woman, she had fallen from an outside stair in a close of the
Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to communicate the
providential circumstance that a baker had been passing
underneath with his bread upon his head. `I would like to
know what kind of providence the baker thought it!' cried my
grandfather.

But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I
have heard or read of him, so far from criticising, he was
doing his utmost to honour and even to emulate his wife's
pronounced opinions. In the only letter which has come to my
hand of Thomas Smith's, I find him informing his wife that he
was `in time for afternoon church'; similar assurances or
cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of Robert
Stevenson; and it is comical and pretty to see the two
generations paying the same court to a female piety more
highly strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert Stevenson
- Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And if
for once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his
sense of humour and justice, into that remark about the case
of Providence and the Baker, I should be sorry for any of his
children who should have stumbled into the same attitude of
criticism. In the apocalyptic style of the housekeeper of
Invermay, woe be to that person! But there was no fear;
husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul
the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with
one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and
equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck,
as I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the
warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman,
whether as described or observed. She diligently read and
marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of
humour under strong control; she talked and found some
amusement at her (or rather at her husband's) dinner-parties.
It is conceivable that even my grandmother was amenable to the
seductions of dress; at least, I find her husband inquiring
anxiously about `the gowns from Glasgow,' and very careful to
describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he had
seen in church `in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of
cloth as the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin
ribbons; the hat or Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian
slouch, and had a plume of three white feathers.'  But all
this leaves a blank impression, and it is rather by reading
backward in these old musty letters, which have moved me now
to laughter and now to impatience, that I glean occasional
glimpses of how she seemed to her contemporaries, and trace
(at work in her queer world of godly and grateful parasites) a
mobile and responsive nature. Fashion moulds us, and
particularly women, deeper than we sometimes think; but a
little while ago, and, in some circles, women stood or fell by
the degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the early
years of the century (and surely with more reason) a character
like that of my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like
a strain of music, the hearts of the men of her own household.
And there is little doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at
the domestic life of her son and her stepdaughter, and
numbered the heads in their increasing nursery, must have
breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.

Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not
for nothing that one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet
Smith as `a veteran in affliction'; and they were all before
middle life experienced in that form of service. By the 1st
of January 1808, besides a pair of still-born twins, children
had been born and still survived to the young couple. By the
11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had followed, and the
two others were still in danger. In the letters of a former
nurserymaid - I give her name, Jean Mitchell, HONORIS CAUSA -
we are enabled to feel, even at this distance of time, some of
the bitterness of that month of bereavement.

`I have this day received,' she writes to Miss Janet,
`the melancholy news of my dear babys' deaths. My heart is
like to break for my dear Mrs. Stevenson. O may she be
supported on this trying occasion! I hope her other three
babys will be spared to her. O, Miss Smith, did I think when
I parted from my sweet babys that I never was to see them
more?'  `I received,' she begins her next, `the mournful news
of my dear Jessie's death. I also received the hair of my
three sweet babys, which I will preserve as dear to their
memorys and as a token of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's friendship
and esteem. At my leisure hours, when the children are in
bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I dream of them. About two
weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little Jessie came running
to me in her usual way, and I took her in my arms. O my dear
babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in heaven, we
would not repine nor grieve for their loss.'

By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a
man of obvious sense and human value, but hateful to the
present biographer, because he wrote so many letters and
conveyed so little information, summed up this first period of
affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: `Your dear sister but a
little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming
creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope
that one day they should fill active stations in society and
become an ornament in the Church below. But ah!'

Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to
be, and for not much less a period the tears have been dried.
And to this day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters,
we hear the sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the
lost. Never was such a massacre of the innocents; teething
and chincough and scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round;
and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths
about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents
deplore and recall the little losses of their own. `It is
impossible to describe the Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the
three last days of his life,' writes Mrs. Laurie to Mrs.
Smith. `Never - never, my dear aunt, could I wish to eface
the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never, my dear
aunt!'  And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the
survivors are buried in one grave.

There was another death in 1812; it passes almost
unremarked; a single funeral seemed but a small event to these
`veterans in affliction'; and by 1816 the nursery was full
again. Seven little hopefuls enlivened the house; some were
growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already wrote
notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife:
and to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious
care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic applications.
Here, for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is part of a
mythological account of London, with a moral for the three
gentlemen, `Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson,' to
whom the document is addressed:

`There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like
other large towns, there are many bad men here as well as many
good men. The natives of London are in general not so tall
and strong as the people of Edinburgh, because they have not
so much pure air, and instead of taking porridge they eat
cakes made with sugar and plums. Here you have thousands of
carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to take you to all
parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on the river
Thames. But you must have money to pay, otherwise you can get
nothing. Now the way to get money is, become clever men and
men of education, by being good scholars.'

From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:

`It is now about eight o'clock with me, and I imagine you
to be busy with the young folks, hearing the questions
[ANGLICE, catechism], and indulging the boys with a chapter
from the large Bible, with their interrogations and your
answers in the soundest doctrine. I hope James is getting his
verse as usual, and that Mary is not forgetting her little
HYMN. While Jeannie will be reading Wotherspoon, or some
other suitable and instructive book, I presume our friend,
Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news of A THRONG
KIRK [a crowded church] and a great sermon. You may mention,
with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul's to-
day, and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James
Lawrie. The text was "Examine and see that ye be in the
faith." '

A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the
distant scene - the humour of happy men and happy homes. Yet
it is penned upon the threshold of fresh sorrow. James and
Mary - he of the verse and she of the hymn - did not much more
than survive to welcome their returning father. On the 25th,
one of the godly women writes to Janet:

`My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you,
you was so affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could
think of nothing else. But on Saturday, when I went to
inquire after your health, how was I startled to hear that
dear James was gone! Ah, what is this? My dear benefactors,
doing so much good to many, to the Lord, suddenly to be
deprived of their most valued comforts! I was thrown into
great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these
things were done to such a family. I could not rest, but at
midnight, whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind
- "Those whom ye deplore are walking with me in white."  I
conclude from this the Lord saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: "I
gave them to be brought up for me: well done, good and
faithful! they are fully prepared, and now I must present them
to my father and your father, to my God and your God." '

It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and
daring hand. I quote it as a model of a letter of condolence;
be sure it would console. Very different, perhaps quite as
welcome, is this from a lighthouse inspector to my
grandfather:

`In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray
cheeks in silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet
little friends. Well do I remember, and you will call to
mind, their little innocent and interesting stories. Often
have they come round me and taken me by the hand, but alas! I
am no more destined to behold them.'

The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks
of the homeliest babe seem in the retrospect `heavenly the
three last days of his life.'  But it appears that James and
Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a
record was preserved a long while in the family of their
remarks and `little innocent and interesting stories,' and the
blow and the blank were the more sensible.

Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon
his voyage of inspection, part by land, part by sea. He left
his wife plunged in low spirits; the thought of his loss, and
still more of her concern, was continually present in his
mind, and he draws in his letters home an interesting picture
of his family relations:

`WINDYGATES INN, MONDAY (POSTMARK JULY 16TH)

`MY DEAREST JEANNIE, - While the people of the inn are
getting me a little bit of something to eat, I sit down to
tell you that I had a most excellent passage across the water,
and got to Wemyss at mid-day. I hope the children will be
very good, and that Robert will take a course with you to
learn his Latin lessons daily; he may, however, read English
in company. Let them have strawberries on Saturdays.'

`WESTHAVEN, 17TH JULY.

`I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport,
opposite Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath. You
may tell the boys that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman's
tent. I found my bed rather hard, but the lodgings were
otherwise extremely comfortable. The encampment is on the
Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite to Dundee. From
the door of the tent you command the most beautiful view of
the Firth, both up and down, to a great extent. At night all
was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful
appearance of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in
with the song of many little birds.'

`ABERDEEN, JULY 19TH.

`I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors
regularly and taking much exercise. I would have you to MAKE
THE MARKETS DAILY - and by all means to take a seat in the
coach once or twice in the week and see what is going on in
town. [The family were at the sea-side.]  It will be good not
to be too great a stranger to the house. It will be rather
painful at first, but as it is to be done, I would have you
not to be too strange to the house in town.

`Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier - his name
is Henderson - who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and
other commanders. He returned very lately with only
eightpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and found his father and
mother both in life, though they had never heard from him, nor
he from them. He carried my great-coat and umbrella a few
miles.'

`FRASERBURGH, JULY 20th.

`Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary
and Jeannie found it. As I am travelling along the coast
which they are acquainted with, you had better cause Robert
bring down the map from Edinburgh; and it will be a good
exercise in geography for the young folks to trace my course.
I hope they have entered upon the writing. The library will
afford abundance of excellent books, which I wish you would
employ a little. I hope you are doing me the favour to go
much out with the boys, which will do you much good and
prevent them from getting so very much overheated.'

[TO THE BOYS - PRINTED.]

`When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your
dear little brother James and your sweet little sister Mary
were still with us. But it has pleased God to remove them to
another and a better world, and we must submit to the will of
Providence. I must, however, request of you to think
sometimes upon them, and to be very careful not to do anything
that will displease or vex your mother. It is therefore
proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much about,
and that you learn your lessons.'

`I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head
Lighthouse, which I found in good order. All this time I
travelled upon good roads, and paid many a toll-man by the
way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff there is no toll-bars, and
the road is so bad that I had to walk up and down many a hill,
and for want of bridges the horses had to drag the chaise up
to the middle of the wheels in water. At Banff I saw a large
ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a
wreck for want of a good harbour. Captain Wilson - to whom I
beg my compliments - will show you a ship of 300 tons. At the
towns of Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are
built of marble, and the rocks on this part of the coast or
sea-side are marble. But, my dear Boys, unless marble be
polished and dressed, it is a very coarse-looking stone, and
has no more beauty than common rock. As a proof of this, ask
the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson's Marble
Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its
stages, and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble! The
use I wish to make of this is to tell you that, without
education, a man is just like a block of rough, unpolished
marble. Notice, in proof of this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr.
M'Gregor [the tutor] know, and observe how little a man knows
who is not a good scholar. On my way to Fochabers I passed
through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and saw many deer
running in these woods.'

[TO MRS. STEVENSON.]

`INVERNESS, JULY 21ST.

`I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I
have breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and
dine about six o'clock. I do not know who is the clergyman
here, but I shall think of you all. I travelled in the mail-
coach [from Banff] almost alone. While it was daylight I kept
the top, and the passing along a country I had never before
seen was a considerable amusement. But, my dear, you are all
much in my thoughts, and many are the objects which recall the
recollection of our tender and engaging children we have so
recently lost. We must not, however, repine. I could not for
a moment wish any change of circumstances in their case; and
in every comparative view of their state, I see the Lord's
goodness in removing them from an evil world to an abode of
bliss; and I must earnestly hope that you may be enabled to
take such a view of this affliction as to live in the happy
prospect of our all meeting again to part no more - and that
under such considerations you are getting up your spirits. I
wish you would walk about, and by all means go to town, and do
not sit much at home.'

`INVERNESS, JULY 23RD.

`I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I
am happy to find that you are so much with my mother, because
that sort of variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to
keep it from brooding too much upon one subject. Sensibility
and tenderness are certainly two of the most interesting and
pleasing qualities of the mind. These qualities are also none
of the least of the many endearingments of the female
character. But if that kind of sympathy and pleasing
melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be much
indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the
mind as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for
the duties and proper enjoyments of life. Resignation sinks
into a kind of peevish discontent. I am far, however, from
thinking there is the least danger of this in your case, my
dear; for you have been on all occasions enabled to look upon
the fortunes of this life as under the direction of a higher
power, and have always preserved that propriety and
consistency of conduct in all circumstances which endears your
example to your family in particular, and to your friends. I
am therefore, my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to
the house up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in the house, to
visit the place of the dead children], and to put yourself in
the way of the visits of your friends. I wish you would call
on the Miss Grays, and it would be a good thing upon a
Saturday to dine with my mother, and take Meggy and all the
family with you, and let them have their strawberries in town.
The tickets of one of the OLD-FASHIONED COACHES would take you
all up, and if the evening were good, they could all walk
down, excepting Meggy and little David.'

`INVERNESS, JULY 25TH, 11 P.M.

`Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go
the voyage with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded
room, I must no longer transgress. You must remember me the
best way you can to the children.'

`ON BOARD OF THE LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, JULY 29TH.

`I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to
church. It happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a
Mr. Smith at that place conclude the service with a very
suitable exhortation. There seemed a great concourse of
people, but they had rather an unfortunate day for them at the
tent, as it rained a good deal. After drinking tea at the
inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on board, and we sailed
about eight last night. The wind at present being rather a
beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of standing
into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you know
my progress and that I am well.'

`LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, STORNOWAY, AUGUST 4TH.

`To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea. I
read the 14th chapter, I think, of Job. Captain Wemyss has
been in the habit of doing this on board his own ship,
agreeably to the Articles of War. Our passage round the Cape
[Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and as the wind was
northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the whole have
made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in Orkney.
I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has much
spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect
enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly.
Let me entreat you to move about much, and take a walk with
the boys to Leith. I think they have still many places to see
there, and I wish you would indulge them in this respect. Mr.
Scales is the best person I know for showing them the
sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he would have great pleasure in
undertaking this. My dear, I trust soon to be with you, and
that through the goodness of God we shall meet all well.'

'There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for
America, each with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a
few days to upwards of sixty! Their prospects must be very
forlorn to go with a slender purse for distant and unknown
countries.'

`LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, OFF GREENOCK, AUG. 18TH.

`It was after CHURCH-TIME before we got here, but we had
prayers upon deck on the way up the Clyde. This has, upon the
whole, been a very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys
it much, has been an excellent companion; we met with
pleasure, and shall part with regret.'

Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather
should have learned so little of the attitude and even the
dialect of the spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years
in a most religious circle, he could drop without sense of
incongruity from a period of accepted phrases to `trust his
wife was GETTING UP HER SPIRITS,' or think to reassure her as
to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning that he had
read prayers on the deck of his frigate `AGREEABLY TO THE
ARTICLES OF WAR'! Yet there is no doubt - and it is one of
the most agreeable features of the kindly series - that he was
doing his best to please, and there is little doubt that he
succeeded. Almost all my grandfather's private letters have
been destroyed. This correspondence has not only been
preserved entire, but stitched up in the same covers with the
works of the godly women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the
painful Mrs. Ogle. I did not think to mention the good dame,
but she comes in usefully as an example. Amongst the
treasures of the ladies of my family, her letters have been
honoured with a volume to themselves. I read about a half of
them myself; then handed over the task to one of stauncher
resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be
found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was
her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at
second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in
which my grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert
Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary `Sandford
and Merton,' his interest in the whole page of experience, his
perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems romantic to
a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good
sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness,
would seem to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and
worldly. And if these letters were by an exception cherished
and preserved, it would be for one or both of two reasons -
because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet reminders of a
time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps touched,
by the writer's guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.

After this date there were two more births and two more
deaths, so that the number of the family remained unchanged;
in all five children survived to reach maturity and to outlive
their parents.

CHAPTER II
THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
I

IT were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined
than that between the lives of the men and women of this
family: the one so chambered, so centred in the affections and
the sensibilities; the other so active, healthy, and
expeditious. From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my
grandfather, in particular, seems to have been possessed with
a demon of activity in travel. In 1802, by direction of the
Northern Lighthouse Board, he had visited the coast of England
from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by the Scilly Islands
to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance of 2500
miles. In 1806 I find him starting `on a tour round the south
coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.'  Peace was
not long declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where
he was in time to see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys,
`about twenty of Bonaparte's ENGLISH FLOTILLA lying in a state
of decay, the object of curiosity to Englishmen.'  By 1834 he
seems to have been acquainted with the coast of France from
Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer to
the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and
laborious travel.

In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the
appointment, the extended and formidable coast of Scotland was
lighted at a single point - the Isle of May, in the jaws of
the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a hundred and
fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron chauffer.
The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was
shunned by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were
north about Shetland and west about St. Kilda. When the Board
met, four new lights formed the extent of their intentions -
Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire, at the eastern elbow of the
coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the north and guide
ships passing to the south'ard of Shetland; Island Glass, on
Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate
the navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre. These
works were to be attempted against obstacles, material and
financial, that might have staggered the most bold. Smith had
no ship at his command till 1791; the roads in those
outlandish quarters where his business lay were scarce
passable when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of
Kintyre stood eleven months unlighted while the apparatus
toiled and foundered by the way among rocks and mosses. Not
only had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted; the
supply of oil must be maintained, and the men fed, in the same
inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with its
routine and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a
new trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and
organised. The funds of the Board were at the first laughably
inadequate. They embarked on their career on a loan of twelve
hundred pounds, and their income in 1789, after relief by a
fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than three hundred.
It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in
these early years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and
since he built and lighted one tower after another, and
created and bequeathed to his successors the elements of an
excellent administration, it may be conceded that he was not
after all an unfortunate choice for a first engineer.

War added fresh complications. In 1794 Smith came `very
near to be taken' by a French squadron. In 1813 Robert
Stevenson was cruising about the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath
in the immediate fear of Commodore Rogers. The men, and
especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service must be
protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of
the press-gang. And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at
times embarrassing.

`I set off on foot,' writes my grandfather, `for
Marazion, a town at the head of Mount's Bay, where I was in
hopes of getting a boat to freight. I had just got that
length, and was making the necessary inquiry, when a young
man, accompanied by several idle-looking fellows, came up to
me, and in a hasty tone said, "Sir, in the king's name I seize
your person and papers."  To which I replied that I should be
glad to see his authority, and know the reason of an address
so abrupt. He told me the want of time prevented his taking
regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return
to Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy. I
proposed to submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace,
who was immediately applied to, and came to the inn where I
was. He seemed to be greatly agitated, and quite at a loss
how to proceed. The complaint preferred against me was "that
I had examined the Longships Lighthouse with the most minute
attention, and was no less particular in my inquiries at the
keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk rocks lying off
the Land's End, with the sets of the currents and tides along
the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the situation
of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a beacon
which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk
rocks, and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape Cornwall.
Further, that I had refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe's
invitation to dinner, offering as an apology that I had some
particular business on hand." '

My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and
letter of credit; but the justice, after perusing them, `very
gravely observed that they were "musty bits of paper," ' and
proposed to maintain the arrest. Some more enlightened
magistrates at Penzance relieved him of suspicion and left him
at liberty to pursue his journey, - `which I did with so much
eagerness,' he adds, `that I gave the two coal lights on the
Lizard only a very transient look.'

Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in
character from those in England. The English coast is in
comparison a habitable, homely place, well supplied with
towns; the Scottish presents hundreds of miles of savage
islands and desolate moors. The Parliamentary committee of
1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with
my grandfather that the work at the various stations should be
let out on contract `in the neighbourhood,' where sheep and
deer, and gulls and cormorants, and a few ragged gillies,
perhaps crouching in a bee-hive house, made up the only
neighbours. In such situations repairs and improvements could
only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather expressed
it) a few `lads,' placing them under charge of a foreman, and
despatching them about the coast as occasion served. The
particular danger of these seas increased the difficulty. The
course of the lighthouse tender lies amid iron-bound coasts,
among tide-races, the whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, flocks
of islands, flocks of reefs, many of them uncharted. The aid
of steam was not yet. At first in random coasting sloop, and
afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the
engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers,
and sometimes late into the stormy autumn. For pages together
my grandfather's diary preserves a record of these rude
experiences; of hard winds and rough seas; and of `the try-
sail and storm-jib, those old friends which I never like to
see.'  They do not tempt to quotation, but it was the man's
element, in which he lived, and delighted to live, and some
specimen must be presented. On Friday, September 10th, 1830,
the REGENT lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry: `The gale
increases, with continued rain.'  On the morrow, Saturday,
11th, the weather appeared to moderate, and they put to sea,
only to be driven by evening into Levenswick. There they lay,
`rolling much,' with both anchors ahead and the square yard on
deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th. Saturday and Sunday
they were plying to the southward with a `strong breeze and a
heavy sea,' and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.
`Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication
with the shore. We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot
communicate with him. It blows "mere fire," as the sailors
express it.'  And for three days more the diary goes on with
tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong gales from the
southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or Deer
Sound. I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in
which my grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and
anxious exactitude about details. It must not be forgotten
that these voyages in the tender were the particular pleasure
and reward of his existence; that he had in him a reserve of
romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and
perils; that to him it was `great gain' to be eight nights and
seven days in the savage bay of Levenswick - to read a book in
the much agitated cabin - to go on deck and hear the gale
scream in his ears, and see the landscape dark with rain and
the ship plunge at her two anchors - and to turn in at night
and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth, to the
glamorous and continued voices of the gale.

His perils and escapes were beyond counting. I shall
only refer to two: the first, because of the impression made
upon himself; the second, from the incidental picture it
presents of the north islanders. On the 9th October 1794 he
took passage from Orkney in the sloop ELIZABETH of Stromness.
She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird Head,
where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and
wind seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain
landed him, to continue his journey more expeditiously ashore.
A gale immediately followed, and the ELIZABETH was driven back
to Orkney and lost with all hands. The second escape I have
been in the habit of hearing related by an eye-witness, my own
father, from the earliest days of childhood. On a September
night, the REGENT lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a
violent and windless swell. It was still dark, when they were
alarmed by the sound of breakers, and an anchor was
immediately let go. The peep of dawn discovered them swinging
in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona (1) and the surf
bursting close under their stern. There was in this place a
hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their
huts stood close about the head of the beach. All slept; the
doors were closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious
watchers on board ship seemed to contemplate a village of the
dead. It was thought possible to launch a boat and tow the
REGENT from her place of danger; and with this view a signal
of distress was made and a gun fired with a red-hot poker from
the galley. Its detonation awoke the sleepers. Door after
door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher
after fisher was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching
himself, nightcap on head. Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and
my pen tripped; for it should rather stand wrecker after
wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed
any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously awaited
the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side
and waited also. To the end of his life, my father remembered
that amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with
a special and natural animosity, the boys of his own age. But
presently a light air sprang up, and filled the sails, and
fainted, and filled them again; and little by little the
REGENT fetched way against the swell, and clawed off shore
into the turbulent firth.

(1) This is only a probable hypothesis; I have tried to
identify my father's anecdote in my grandfather's diary, and
may very well have been deceived. - [R. L. S.]

The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on
open beaches or among shelving rocks, not for persons only,
but for coals and food, and the fragile furniture of light-
rooms. It was often impossible. In 1831 I find my
grandfather `hovering for a week' about the Pentland Skerries
for a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult.
Much knack and enterprise were early developed among the
seamen of the service; their management of boats is to this
day a matter of admiration; and I find my grandfather in his
diary depicting the nature of their excellence in one happily
descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had
landed `the small stores and nine casks of oil WITH ALL THE
ACTIVITY OF A SMUGGLER.'  And it was one thing to land,
another to get on board again. I have here a passage from the
diary, where it seems to have been touch-and-go. `I landed at
Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point, in a MERE GALE
OR BLAST OF WIND from west-south-west, at 2 p.m. It blew so
fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the
ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore. While I was in
the light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the
tremor of the Bell Rock, but with the WAVING OF A TREE! This
the light-keepers seemed to be quite familiar to, the
principal keeper remarking that "it was very pleasant,"
perhaps meaning interesting or curious. The captain worked
the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I
got on board again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the
point.'  But not even the dexterity of Soutar could prevail
always; and my grandfather must at times have been left in
strange berths and with but rude provision. I may instance
the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon an
islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of
the islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and
lobsters.

The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I
owe him a vignette. Soutar first attracted notice as mate of
a praam at the Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of
the REGENT. He was active, admirably skilled in his trade,
and a man incapable of fear. Once, in London, he fell among a
gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his rusticity
and his prodigious accent. They plied him with drink - a
hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they
proposed cards, and Soutar would not play. At last, one of
them, regarding him with a formidable countenance, inquired if
he were not frightened? `I'm no' very easy fleyed,' replied
the captain. And the rooks withdrew after some easier pigeon.
So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity of so many
voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather's
estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court
and please him with much hypocritical skill. He usually dined
on Sundays in the cabin. He used to come down daily after
dinner for a glass of port or whisky, often in his full rig of
sou'-wester, oilskins, and long boots; and I have often heard
it described how insinuatingly he carried himself on these
appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with
a blunt and seamanlike demeanour. My father and uncles, with
the devilish penetration of the boy, were far from being
deceived; and my father, indeed, was favoured with an object-
lesson not to be mistaken. He had crept one rainy night into
an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place of ambush
overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins.
The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and
the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent
ruffian. Of Soutar, I may say TANTUM VIDI, having met him in
the Leith docks now more than thirty years ago, when he
abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged me (in
the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left
impressed for ever on my memory the image of his own
Bardolphian nose. He died not long after.

The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the
sea; he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce
accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-
chaise, beyond even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided
by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my grand-father
seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave up
the idea - `such,' he writes with characteristic emphasis and
capital letters, `is the Plague of Baiting.'  He was a good
pedestrian; at the age of fifty-eight I find him covering
seventeen miles over the moors of the Mackay country in less
than seven hours, and that is not bad travelling for a
scramble. The piece of country traversed was already a
familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape
Wrath; and I think I can scarce do better than reproduce from
the diary some traits of his first visit. The tender lay in
Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning they sat down to
breakfast on board; by six they were ashore - my grandfather,
Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and had
been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the
neighbourhood and a pair of gillies. About noon they reached
the Kyle of Durness and passed the ferry. By half-past three
they were at Cape Wrath - not yet known by the emphatic
abbreviation of `The Cape' - and beheld upon all sides of them
unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the high-
piled Western Ocean. The site of the tower was chosen.
Perhaps it is by inheritance of blood, but I know few things
more inspiriting than this location of a lighthouse in a
designated space of heather and air, through which the sea-
birds are still flying. By 9 p.m. the return journey had
brought them again to the shores of the Kyle. The night was
dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small,
Soutar and Mr. Stevenson were left on the far side, while the
rest of the party embarked and were received into the
darkness. They made, in fact, a safe though an alarming
passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure; and
my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach,
impatient for their turn to pass, and tormented with rising
anxiety as to the fate of their companions. At length they
sought the shelter of a shepherd's house. `We had miserable
up-putting,' the diary continues, `and on both sides of the
ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and
but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as
soundly as ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of
sixteen hours.'

To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past
centuries. The tide of tourists that flows yearly in
Scotland, vulgarising all where it approaches, is still
defined by certain barriers. It will be long ere there is a
hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be
long ere any CHAR-A-BANC, laden with tourists, shall drive up
to Barra Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks. They are
farther from London than St. Petersburg, and except for the
towers, sounding and shining all night with fog-bells and the
radiance of the light-room, glittering by day with the trivial
brightness of white paint, these island and moorland stations
seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to
the end of my grandfather's career the isolation was far
greater. There ran no post at all in the Long Island; from
the light-house on Barra Head a boat must be sent for letters
as far as Tobermory, between sixty and seventy miles of open
sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised Sir Walter
Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my
grandfather reported on the subject. The group contained at
the time a population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade
which had increased in twenty years seven-fold, to between
three and four thousand tons. Yet the mails were despatched
and received by chance coasting vessels at the rate of a penny
a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between
opportunities, and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at
a moment's notice, the bellman was sent hastily through the
streets of Lerwick. Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy
miles apart, there was `no trade communication whatever.'

Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with
the three largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and
forty-seven years earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds,
or forty-two, when Robert Stevenson became conjoined with him
in these excursions, the barbarism was deep, the people sunk
in superstition, the circumstances of their life perhaps
unique in history. Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the Bay
of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to
take up and to return experienced seamen. On the outlying
islands the clergy lived isolated, thinking other thoughts,
dwelling in a different country from their parishioners, like
missionaries in the South Seas. My grandfather's unrivalled
treasury of anecdote was never written down; it embellished
his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died; and
such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands
of Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group. These
bordered on one of the water-highways of civilisation; a great
fleet passed annually in their view, and of the shipwrecks of
the world they were the scene and cause of a proportion wholly
incommensurable to their size. In one year, 1798, my
grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.

`Hardly a year passed,' he writes, `without instances of
this kind; for, owing to the projecting points of this
strangely formed island, the lowness and whiteness of its
eastern shores, and the wonderful manner in which the scanty
patches of land are intersected with lakes and pools of water,
it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and has often been
fatally mistaken for an open sea. It had even become
proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that "if
wrecks were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor
isle of Sanday as anywhere else."  On this and the
neighbouring islands the inhabitants had certainly had their
share of wrecked goods, for the eye is presented with these
melancholy remains in almost every form. For example,
although quarries are to be met with generally in these
islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
(ANGLICE, walls), yet instances occur of the land being
enclosed, even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers.
The author has actually seen a park (ANGLICE, meadow) paled
round chiefly with cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a
Honduras-built ship; and in one island, after the wreck of a
ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been known to take
claret to their barley-meal porridge. On complaining to one
of the pilots of the badness of his boat's sails, he replied
to the author with some degree of pleasantry, "Had it been His
will that you came na' here wi' your lights, we might 'a' had
better sails to our boats, and more o' other things."  It may
further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas's farms are
to be let in these islands a competition takes place for the
lease, and it is BONA FIDE understood that a much higher rent
is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for
the chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages
attending shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.'

The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or,
rather, mixed it with their English. The walls of their huts
were built to a great thickness of rounded stones from the
sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded with earth, and perforated
by a single hole for the escape of smoke. The grass grew
beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral
lawn; there were no windows, and in my grandfather's
expression, `there was really no demonstration of a house
unless it were the diminutive door.'  He once landed on
Ronaldsay with two friends. The inhabitants crowded and
pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or
resident factor of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling
out to the natives to stand off and let the gentlemen come
forward to the laird; upon which one of the islanders, as
spokesman, called out, "God ha'e us, man! thou needsna mak'
sic a noise. It's no' every day we ha'e THREE HATTED MEN on
our isle." '  When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first
time, perhaps) to Sanday, and began in the King's name to
complain of the unconscionable swarms of dogs, and to menace
the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced that my grandfather
and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by an old
lady in a Ronaldsay hut. Her hut, which was similar to the
model described, stood on a Ness, or point of land jutting
into the sea. They were made welcome in the firelit cellar,
placed `in CASEY or straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian
fashion, with arms, and a canopy overhead,' and given milk in
a wooden dish. These hospitalities attended to, the old lady
turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the Surveyor of
Taxes. `Sir,' said she, `gin ye'll tell the King that I canna
keep the Ness free o' the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun's,
and twa guid hun's too, he'll pass me threa the tax on dugs.'

This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging
simplicity, are characters of a secluded people. Mankind -
and, above all, islanders - come very swiftly to a bearing,
and find very readily, upon one convention or another, a
tolerable corporate life. The danger is to those from
without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands,
but appear suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized
apparitions. For these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling
of kinship is awakened by their peril; they will assist at a
shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of Lunga, as spectators, and
when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn with dead
bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after
a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is not
wickedness: it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest
power, the sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness
of feeble and poor races. Think how many viking ships had
sailed by these islands in the past, how many vikings had
landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the
dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them,
if you are able, for that belief (which may be called one of
the parables of the devil's gospel) that a man rescued from
the sea will prove the bane of his deliverer. It might be
thought that my grandfather, coming there unknown, and upon an
employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must have run the
hazard of his life. But this were to misunderstand. He came
franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was the King's
officer; the work was `opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter
Trail, minister of the parish'; God and the King had decided
it, and the people of these pious islands bowed their heads.
There landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay, during the last
decade of the eighteenth century, a traveller whose life seems
really to have been imperilled. A very little man of a
swarthy complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved,
from a long boat passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of
the parish schoolmaster. But he had been seen landing. The
inhabitants had identified him for a Pict, as, by some
singular confusion of name, they called the dark and dwarfish
aboriginal people of the land. Immediately the obscure
ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to
work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the
room-door with fearful whisperings. For some time the
schoolmaster held them at bay, and at last despatched a
messenger to call my grand-father. He came: he found the
islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of
the dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular of
testimony, the traveller's uncouth and thick-soled boots; he
argued, and finding argument unavailing, consented to enter
the room and examine with his own eyes the sleeping Pict. One
glance was sufficient: the man was now a missionary, but he
had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom my
grandfather had dealt. He came forth again with this report,
and the folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to
their own houses. They were timid as sheep and ignorant as
limpets; that was all. But the Lord deliver us from the
tender mercies of a frightened flock!

I will give two more instances of their superstition.
When Sir Walter Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my
grandfather put in his pocket a hundred-foot line, which he
unfortunately lost.

`Some years afterwards,' he writes, `one of my assistants
on a visit to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm
in a cottage close by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-
line in the bole or sole of the cottage window, he asked the
woman where she got this well-known professional appendage.
She said: "O sir, ane of the bairns fand it lang syne at the
Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and thinking
it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole, and
it has layen there ever since." '

This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the
master hand of Scott himself:

`At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island,
called Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie
Millie, who helped out her subsistence by selling favourable
winds to mariners. He was a venturous master of a vessel who
left the roadstead of Stromness without paying his offering to
propitiate Bessie Millie! Her fee was extremely moderate,
being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her kettle and
gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she disclaimed
all unlawful acts. T