In this year died the Viscountess Stair—born Margaret Ross of Balniel, in Wigtonshire—the wife of the ablest man of his age and country, and mother of a race which has included an extraordinary number of men of talent and official distinction. The pair had been married very nearly fifty years, and they were tenderly attached to the last. The glories of the family history had not been quite free of shade; witness the tragical death of the eldest daughter Janet, the original of Lucy Ashton in _The Bride of Lammermoor_.[91] Lady Stair is admitted to have been a woman of a soaring mind, of great shrewdness and energy of character, and skilled in the ways of the world; and to these qualities on her part it was perhaps, in part, owing that her family, on the whole, prospered so remarkably. The public, however, had such a sense of her singular power over fortune, as to believe that she possessed necromantic gifts, and trafficked with the Evil One. An order which she left at her death regarding the disposal of her body, helped to confirm this popular notion. ‘She desired that she might not be put under ground, but that her coffin should stand upright on one end of it, promising that, while she remained in that situation, the Dalrymples should continue to flourish. What was the old lady’s motive for the request, or whether she really made such a promise, I shall not take upon me to determine; but it’s certain her coffin stands upright in the aile of the church of Kirkliston, the burial-place of the family.’[92] A local historian attributes to her ladyship ‘one of the best puns extant. Graham of Claverhouse (commonly pronounced Clavers) was appointed sheriff of Wigtonshire in 1682. On one occasion, when this violent persecutor had been inveighing, in her presence, against our illustrious reformer, she said: “Why are you so severe on the character of John Knox? You are both reformers: he gained his point by clavers [talk]; you attempt to gain yours by knocks.”’[93] [Sidenote: AUG. 13.] The boy carrying the post-bag on its last stage from England [Sidenote: 1692.] was robbed by ‘a person mounted on horseback with a sword about him, and another person on foot with a pistol in his hand, upon the highway from Haddington to Edinburgh, near that place thereof called Jock’s Lodge [a mile from town], about ten hours of the night.’ The robbers took ‘the packet or common mail with the horse whereon the boy rode.’ The Privy Council issued a proclamation, offering a reward of a hundred pounds for the apprehension of the offenders, with a free pardon to any one of them who should inform upon the rest. [Sidenote: OCT. 1.]