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 26th May, 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 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.