On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk, following honest trades—­millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory.  John, the land-labourer, is the one 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. {9a}