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-