Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
RECORDS OF A
FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic for Chatto & Windus]
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1912
_All rights reserved_
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. {2a}
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. {3a} 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. {4a} 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. {4b} 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, {4c} 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.
‘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. {7a} But it was otherwise
ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger. {7b}
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. {9a}
‘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. {12a}
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 [_Anglicé_, 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_ 16_th_)
‘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_, 17_th_ _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_ 19_th_.
‘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_ 20_th_.
‘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_ 21_st_.
‘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_ 23_rd_.
‘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_ 25_th_, 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_ 29_th_.
‘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_ 4_th_.
‘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._ 18_th_.
‘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.