under such considerations you are getting up your spirits. I
wish you would walk about, and by all means go to town, and do

not sit much at home.'
`INVERNESS, JULY 23RD.

`I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I
am happy to find that you are so much with my mother, because

that sort of variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to
keep it from brooding too much upon one subject. Sensibility

and tenderness are certainly two of the most interesting and
pleasing qualities of the mind. These qualities are also none

of the least of the many endearingments of the female
character. But if that kind of sympathy and pleasing

melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be much
indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the

mind as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for
the duties and proper enjoyments of life. Resignation sinks

into a kind of peevish discontent. I am far, however, from
thinking there is the least danger of this in your case, my

dear; for you have been on all occasions enabled to look upon
the fortunes of this life as under the direction of a higher

power, and have always preserved that propriety and
consistency of conduct in all circumstances which endears your

example to your family in particular, and to your friends. I
am therefore, my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to

the house up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in the house, to
visit the place of the dead children], and to put yourself in

the way of the visits of your friends. I wish you would call
on the Miss Grays, and it would be a good thing upon a

Saturday to dine with my mother, and take Meggy and all the
family with you, and let them have their strawberries in town.

The tickets of one of the OLD-FASHIONED COACHES would take you
all up, and if the evening were good, they could all walk

down, excepting Meggy and little David.'
`INVERNESS, JULY 25TH, 11 P.M.

`Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go
the voyage with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded

room, I must no longer transgress. You must remember me the
best way you can to the children.'

`ON BOARD OF THE LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, JULY 29TH.
`I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to

church. It happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a
Mr. Smith at that place conclude the service with a very

suitable exhortation. There seemed a great concourse of
people, but they had rather an unfortunate day for them at the

tent, as it rained a good deal. After drinking tea at the
inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on board, and we sailed

about eight last night. The wind at present being rather a
beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of standing

into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you know
my progress and that I am well.'

`LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, STORNOWAY, AUGUST 4TH.
`To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea. I

read the 14th chapter, I think, of Job. Captain Wemyss has
been in the habit of doing this on board his own ship,

agreeably to the Articles of War. Our passage round the Cape
[Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and as the wind was

northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the whole have
made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in Orkney.

I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has much
spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect

enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly.
Let me entreat you to move about much, and take a walk with

the boys to Leith. I think they have still many places to see
there, and I wish you would indulge them in this respect. Mr.

Scales is the best person I know for showing them the
sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he would have great pleasure in

undertaking this. My dear, I trust soon to be with you, and
that through the goodness of God we shall meet all well.'

'There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for
America, each with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a

few days to upwards of sixty! Their prospects must be very
forlorn to go with a slender purse for distant and unknown

countries.'
`LIGHTHOUSE YACHT, OFF GREENOCK, AUG. 18TH.

`It was after CHURCH-TIME before we got here, but we had
prayers upon deck on the way up the Clyde. This has, upon the

whole, been a very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys
it much, has been an excellent companion; we met with

pleasure, and shall part with regret.'
Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather

should have learned so little of the attitude and even the
dialect of the spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years

in a most religious circle, he could drop without sense of
incongruity from a period of accepted phrases to `trust his

wife was GETTING UP HER SPIRITS,' or think to reassure her as
to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning that he had

read prayers on the deck of his frigate `AGREEABLY TO THE
ARTICLES OF WAR'! Yet there is no doubt - and it is one of

the most agreeable features of the kindly series - that he was
doing his best to please, and there is little doubt that he

succeeded. Almost all my grandfather's private letters have
been destroyed. This correspondence has not only been

preserved entire, but stitched up in the same covers with the
works of the godly women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the

painful Mrs. Ogle. I did not think to mention the good dame,
but she comes in usefully as an example. Amongst the

treasures of the ladies of my family, her letters have been
honoured with a volume to themselves. I read about a half of

them myself; then handed over the task to one of stauncher
resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be

found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was
her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at

second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in
which my grandmotherdelighted. If I am right, that of Robert

Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary `Sandford
and Merton,' his interest in the whole page of experience, his

perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems romantic to
a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good

sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness,
would seem to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and

worldly. And if these letters were by an exception cherished
and preserved, it would be for one or both of two reasons -

because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet reminders of a
time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps touched,

by the writer's guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.
After this date there were two more births and two more

deaths, so that the number of the family remained unchanged;
in all five children survived to reach maturity and to outlive

their parents.
CHAPTER II

THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
I

IT were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined
than that between the lives of the men and women of this

family: the one so chambered, so centred in the affections and
the sensibilities; the other so active, healthy, and

expeditious. From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my

grandfather, in particular, seems to have been possessed with