Robert Louis Stevenson

HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS

'T

hese are thy works, O father, these thy crown, Whether on high the air

be pure they shine Along the yellowing sunset, and all night Among

the unnumbered stars of God they shine. Or whether fogs arise, and far and

wide The low sea-level drown-each finds a tongue, And all night long the

tolling bell resounds. So shine so toll till night be overpast, Till the stars

vanish, till the sun return, And in the haven rides the fleet at last.' -R. L.

STEVENSON.

In no country in the world is heredity more respected than in Scotland, and

her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the suc-

cesses 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.

3 MARGARET MOYES BLACK

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson-for so thewriterwhom theworld knows as

Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised-valued greatly this doctrine of hered-

ity, 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 ap-

preciation 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 Eng-

land 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 kin-

dled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and his descendants

flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of Stevenson