who burned Elgin
Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he thought the
Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to
his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France. . . . Also among
Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later Gordons of
Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as 'Earl Beardie,'
the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a
Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink from him'; Lady Jean
Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey with the horn,' and
latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the last Laird of Edzell [a
lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who ended his days as hostler
at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad-
singer.

"Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity to
Robert Fergusson. It is more than probable that there was a distant
maternal affinity as well. Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James
Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it
is probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who
previously owned Logie. Fergusson's mother, Elizabeth Forbes, was the
daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant tradition is stated
to have been of the house of Tolquhon. It would certainly be
interesting if this suggested connection could be proved." {5}

"From his Highland ancestors," says the _Quarterly Review_, "Louis
drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and
possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has
flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures
imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly,
strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the
world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of infectious
terror."

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry reappear
and transform other strains, strangely the more remote often being the
strongest and most persistent and wonderful.

"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr Baildon,
"that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his person,
character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back to the
Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy. Stevenson thus drew in
Celtic strains from both sides--from the Balfours a