It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another antique appellation for the sword. Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it could not be otherwise than that the ears of _his_ son, Robert (the man of 1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor of the land in which his lot had been cast.