Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting it entirely.  Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took Campbell, and his son took Drummond.  But this case is different; Stevenson was not taken and left—­it was consistently adhered to.  It does not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan Alpin; but it does follow that some may be.  And I cannot conceal from myself the possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may have had a Highland alias upon his conscience and a claymore in his back parlour.

To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended from a French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one of the Cardinal Beatons.  No details were added.  But the very name of France was so detested in my family for three generations, that I am tempted to suppose there may be something in it. {12a}

CHAPTER I:  DOMESTIC ANNALS

It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell, parish of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant farmer, married one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there was born to these two a son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1710, Robert married, for a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them, in 1720, another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow.  In 1742, Robert the second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan, born June 1752.

With these two brothers my story begins.  Their deaths were simultaneous; their lives unusually brief and full.  Tradition whispered me in childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when others are still curveting a clerk’s stool.  My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had been ‘something romantic’ about Alan’s marriage:  and, alas! he has forgotten what.  It was early at least.  His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a builder in Glasgow, and several times ‘Deacon of the Wrights’:  the date of the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert, the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had scarce passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year.  Here was a youth making haste to give hostages to fortune.  But this early scene of prosperity in love and business was on the point of closing.