You had none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the
trivial _ficelles_ of the business; it is simian, but that is how the
wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn't imitate, hence you kept
free--a wild dog, outside the kennel--and came dam near starving for
your pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as
it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day
in which we were brought up. Civilisation has become reflex with us; you
might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to
the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something
quite different. I defend civilisation for the thing it is, for the
thing it has _come_ to be, the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal
would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb
multitudes _back?_ They don't do anything _because_; they do things,
write able articles, stitch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse.
Go and reason with monkeys!

No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double
great-grandmother, the daughter of David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the
Wrights, married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26, 1774, "at
Santt Kittes of a fiver," by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th
June 1772; and, second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower,
and already the father of our grandmother. This improbable double
connection always tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith
being doubly our great-grandfather.

I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration. My
mother collared one of the photos, of course; the other is stuck up on
my wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Gaelic-Celtic
sharps? you might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a
_M'Stein_ and a _MacStephane_; and our own great-grandfather always
called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at
least three _places_ called Stevenson--_Stevenson_ in Cunningham,
_Stevenson_ in Peebles, and _Stevenson_ in Haddington. And it was not
the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going
to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find some
one.

Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head; they superimposed their
language, they scarce modified the race; only in Berwickshire and
Roxburgh have they very largely affected the place names. The
Scandinavians did much more to Scotlan