Janet Anderson was the daughter of David Anderson of Finzeach, in Aberdeenshire; a man who was possessed of such universal talent that he was popularly called ‘Davie do a’ thing.’ Two of his deeds come down to posterity; the one, the building of St Nicholas steeple in Aberdeen, upon which he himself is said to have placed the weather-cock; and the other, the removal of a great boulder, called Knock Maitland, which lay in the entrance to Aberdeen harbour and endangered the passage of every ship sailing in or out. This he removed by placing chains under it at low tide, and fastening them to a huge raft, which at high tide lifted up the rock and carried it out to the open sea. Janet Anderson’s near kinsman was the Professor of Mathematics in the University of Paris, and she herself was a great mathematician and is said to have taught her sons. If that was the case, one at least of her pupils did her great credit, for her younger son, James, lived to take a foremost place among the mathematicians of his day, and to be the inventor of the Gregorian Telescope. In 1621, when the Rev. John Gregorie married Janet Anderson, he was the minister of Drumoak, a remote parish on the Dee, where in peaceful times he might have fulfilled his quiet duties with little to disturb him. Towards the end of the first half of the seventeenth century, however, Scotland was in a ferment, and in a state of civil and religious turmoil which made itself felt throughout the land. In Aberdeenshire, both the clergy and the laity were in sympathy rather with Laud and Prelacy than with Henderson and Presbytery. This brought them into violent collision with the party in power, and among the rural clergy there were few names more distasteful to the Covenanters than the name of John Gregorie. When therefore in 1639, the government sent an army to coerce refractory Aberdeenshire, he knew that he would receive no toleration and fled, meaning to join the king at Newcastle. The ship in which he tried to escape was boarded, and the fugitives were made to return, and in the following year Gregorie’s fears were realised, for General Monro, who was then stationed near Aberdeen on the outlook for rebels from the Covenant—especially rich ones—remembered the minister of Drumoak. Spalding tells us the pitiful story.