aste 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 May 26th, 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 Scotswomen, she vowed her
son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to
her ambition. A charity school, and some