ne 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.[8]

"STEVENSON--or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of the
clan M