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