d than in Scotland,
and her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the
successes of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of
life their ancestors waged from generation to generation. We of the
present are 'the heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no small
degree the clay from the potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the
natures, physical and mental, of those who have gone before us, and
whose lives and circumstances have made us what we are.

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson--for so the writer whom the world knows
as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised--valued greatly this doctrine of
heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his
ancestry and antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and
character. He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but
rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his
forefathers, which made him desire to be, in his own widely differing
life-work, as good a man as they.

... 'And I--can I be base?'--he says;
'I must arise, O father, and to port
Some lost complaining seaman pilot home.'

He had reason to think highly of the honourable name which he received
from his father's family. Britain and the whole world has much for which
to thank the Stevensons; not only all along our rough north coasts, but
in every part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their
beacon's blaze have the firm, who are consulting engineers to the
Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those
lights of which Rudyard Kipling in his 'Songs of the English,' sings--

'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas;
From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe,
The coastguard lights of England watch the ships of England go.'

Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of
the sister kingdoms, but from their dreariest points the lights that
have been kindled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and
his descendants flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of
Stevenson a word of blessing to the storm-tossed sailor.

The author was third in descent from that Robert Stevenson, who, by
skill and heroism, planted the lighthouse on the wave-swept Bell
Rock--only uncovered for the possibility of work for