when in obeying the law of his
own nature he had been constrained to disappoint, distress, and for a
time to be much misunderstood by, a father whom he justly loved and
admired with all his heart. Difficulties of this kind he had already
handled in a lighter vein once or twice in fiction--as for instance in
"The Story of a Lie," "The Misadventures of John Nicholson," and "The
Wrecker"--before he grappled with them in the acute and tragic phase in
which they occur in the present story.

These three elements, then, the interest of the historical personality
of Lord Braxfield, the problems and emotions arising from a violent
conflict between duty and nature in a judge, and the difficulties due to
incompatibility and misunderstanding between father and son, lie at the
foundations of the present story. To touch on minor matters, it is
perhaps worth notice, as Mr. Henley reminds me, that the name of Weir
had from of old a special significance for Stevenson's imagination, from
the horrible and true tale of the burning in Edinburgh of Major Weir,
the warlock, and his sister. Another name, that of the episodical
personage of Mr. Torrance the minister, is borrowed direct from life, as
indeed are the whole figure and its surroundings--kirkyard, kirk, and
manse--down even to the black thread mittens: witness the following
passage from a letter of the early seventies:--"I've been to church and
am not depressed--a great step. It was at that beautiful church" [of
Glencorse in the Pentlands, three miles from his father's country house
at Swanston]. "It is a little cruciform place, with a steep slate roof.
The small kirkyard is full of old gravestones; one of a Frenchman from
Dunkerque, I suppose he died prisoner in the military prison hard by.
And one, the most pathetic memorial I ever saw: a poor school-slate, in
a wooden frame, with the inscription cut into it evidently by the
father's own hand. In church, old Mr. Torrance preached, over eighty and
a relic of times forgotten, with his black thread gloves and mild old
face." A side hint for a particular trait in the character of Mrs. Weir
we can trace in some family traditions concerning the writer's own
grandmother, who is reported to have valued piety much more than
efficiency in her domestic servants. I know of no original for that new
and admirable incarnation of the eternal feminine in the elder Kirstie.
The little that Stevenson says about her himself is in a letter written
a fe