r
son, and whose charm of personality made her dear to the old man, and
lastly of 'the clivir lad,' her son, who had spent such happy days in
the old manse garden.

Of all the children in that large family Maggie, the youngest, was
perhaps especially her sister's charge; and one knows, from that elder
sister's description, how sweet, and good, and bright the little girl
was, and how charming was the face, and how loving the heart of the
mother of Robert Louis Stevenson when she too was a child at play in the
manse garden. The mother's beauty and that dainty refinement of face and
voice which she bequeathed to her son came to her in a long and
honourable descent from a family that had for many centuries been noted
for the beauty and the sincere goodness of its women, for the godliness
and the manliness of its men.

The Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour of Colinton was the third son of Mr Balfour,
the Laird of Pilrig. The quaint old house of Pilrig stands a little back
from Leith Walk, the date on it is 1638; and the text inscribed on its
door-stone, 'For we know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle
were dissolved we have a building of God, an house not made with hands
eternal in the heavens,' is a fitting motto for a race whose first
prominent ancestor was that James Balfour of Reformation times, who not
only was a cousin of Melville the Reformer, but who married one of the
Melville family. This double tie to those so entwined with the very life
of that great period in Scotland's history brought Mr James Balfour into
very close communion with such men as Erskine of Dun, the Rev. John
Durie, and many others of the Reforming ministers and gentlemen, with
whom a member of the Pilrig family, the late James Balfour-Melville,
Esq., W.S., in his interesting pamphlet dealing with his family says,
that his ancestor had much godly conversation and communing.

The early promise of the race was not belied in its later descendants,
and the Balfours were noted for their zeal in religion, and in their
country's affairs, as well as for an honourable and prudent application
to the business of life on their own account. Andrew Balfour, the
minister of Kirknewton, signed the protestation for the Kirk in 1617,
and was imprisoned for it. His son James was called to the Scotch Bar,
and was a Clerk of Session in Cromwell's time. A son of his was a
Governor of the Darien Company, and his son, in turn, purchased the
estate of Pilrig where his de