The Den is wooded by birch, beech and other trees and shrubs; in the undergrowth is bracken in extraordinary profusion. West of the village there are the Dens of Auchmeddan, Troup and Gamrie, each well known to botanists and palæontologists. The characteristic features of the coast-line have already been mentioned. To these may be added the Boat Shore, where alone boats may conveniently be kept; the Otter Cave, where tracks of its shy inhabitants appeared at low tide; the Iron Well, where a mineral spring strongly impregnated with oxide of iron oozes from the cliff at the western end of the Broad Shore; and the rocks near it, covered at high tide, where, when the tide was ebbing, we used to gather the most delicious of dulce and whelks of peculiar succulence.

There was little game in the district. The proprietors in the region were not much addicted to sport, and there was comparatively little effort to preserve. We used to go rabbit-shooting in the dunes when we visited our connections the Hendersons at Rattray House, otherwise the only sport was trout-fishing in the streams and sea-fishing in the bay. There were few wild animals, and these were small-stoats, weasels, hedgehogs and the like. Sea birds were fairly numerous guillemots and puffins were often seen, and sometimes after a severe storm were found dead on the beach.

In the days before steam trawlers worked the Moray Firth and the North Sea fishing grounds, one of the finest sights of the kind was to witness, as the sun was setting, the fishing smacks with their brown sails putting out from the villages along the coast, each village sending its fleet until there were a hundred sail or more in sight from one of the promontories of the Aberdour shore. Slowly as the darkness came, the horizon swallowed the fleets until not a sail could be seen. Beyond another horizon these fleets have passed for all time, and things of beauty as they were, they remain only as a memory. Their successors, the trawlers and drifters and their hardy crews, have amply earned the gratitude of half the world by fishing not for their accustomed catch, but for those monsters of the deep whose depredations, great as they have been, would have been greater still but for the skill and endurance of the Scots fishermen. It may never be known how many submarines and their pirate crews lie at the bottom of the North Sea through the vigilance of these Imperial sentinels.

The funeral customs of the village, although not wholly unique, had features which I have not witnessed elsewhere. On the morning of the day of burial, two chairs were taken from the house and placed

in the middle of the village street. Two poles were brought by the carpenter and placed one on each side of the door of the house from which the funeral was to take place. A service was held in one or other of the churches. In the case of all well-known persons, labour in the village and sometimes in the district was wholly suspended. All the men and youths but none of the women attended. The coffin was brought out and placed upon the chairs. The poles were placed under the coffin and held by eight bearers, two on each side of each pole. Then the procession to the graveyard of Old Aberdour began. Every minute or less, a fresh bearer volunteered and stepped silently into the place of one who fell out, the procession proceeded without halting, and during its progress-the distance was about a mile— everyone had an opportunity of acting as bearer. Sometimes the procession numbered several hundred. At the graveyard there was no service, the coffin was silently committed to earth. As is usual in very ancient graveyards, the mould was almost altogether composed of human dust, and the coffin was usually covered with disarticulated bones. On two different occasions someone standing beside me recognised the skull of a relative. Once a man said to me in a solemn whisper, "Thae're ma faither's banes they're pitten in noo." 1

From these notes it may be gathered that, taking into account the variation of the seasons and occasional losses through epidemics among cattle, the people of the Aberdour region were comfortably off. Their life was so self-contained that they were little affected by the fluctuations of prices in the external markets. There were practically no landless people in the region, and the large farmers were neither rich enough nor numerous enough to compose a separate social class. The same was true of the proprietors. There was thus a real feeling of social equality, although there were both differences and fluctuations in well-being. There was no factory industry, or mining, or forestry to draw into or sustain in the district a proletarian labouring population, while the excess of youths of both sexes drifted off, leaving the community rather unprogressive but highly homogeneous and contented with what nature and industry provided

2

"These are my father's bones they are putting in now."

This pervasive sense of equality naturally gave rise to a feeling of political independence, even when this characteristic was unusual in Scotland. The proof may be found, for example, in A Confidential Report on the Opinions, Family Connections or Personal Circumstances of the County Voters, 1788, where the notes "independent," "very independent," "quite independent," are frequently attached to the names of the 178 voters in the county of Aberdeen at that date. See Adam, Sir C. E. (Editor), View of the Political State of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1877.

-a liberty-loving society in a shell in which feudalistic incidents had survived feudal relations.

I have given these details of the position and life of the village of New Aberdour partly because the district had a special character which I think ought to be recorded, and partly because one of my parents was brought up in it and during early boyhood I spent a part of each year there myself. The family of Mavor or Maver, for the name occurs in both forms in the case of even near kinsmen, was before the end of the seventeenth century somewhat widely dispersed in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire. Many youths bearing the names Jacobus Mavor and Gulielmus Mavor appear in the books at King's College, Aberdeen, as "bursars" from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The origin of the name is unknown. There are many Norman family names in Buchan, and it may be one of these. The particular branch of the family to which I belong was settled for a long period in New Deer, which lies about twenty miles south of New Aberdour. It is a tradition in the family that one of its members, as one of a group of fifteen, accompanied Lord Forbes of Pitsligo when he joined the army of the Pretender, and that he remained with him while he was in hiding after the Battle of Culloden.

The only member of the family who achieved notoriety was William Fordyce Mavor, LL.D., Rector of Bladon in Oxfordshire and Vicar of Hurley in Berks. He was born in New Deer in 1758, and was a cousin of my great-grandfather. William Mavor was a member of the Board of Agriculture while Arthur Young was Secretary, and was the author of some of its Reports. He invented a system of shorthand, compiled a spelling-book which had an immense circulation, edited a collection of travels, wrote a Universal History and so many miscellaneous works that altogether some fifty pages of the catalogue of the library of the British Museum are required to contain their titles. The only work of his in which I find any interest is his edition of Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. According to the Extraordinary Black Book,1 the total income from William Mavor's two livings, including the chapelry of Woodstock attached to Bladon, was one hundred and sixty pounds a year. He was thus, like many others of his time, driven to write copiously for the booksellers.

Some more or less distant kinsmen were Fellows of Pembroke and Lincoln in Oxford in the beginning of the nineteenth century. One branch of the family went to Virginia at an early period in the history of that colony, and at later periods others went to Illinois and Michigan 1 London, 1832, pp. 115 and 661.

as well as to South America and New Zealand. One kinsman was a captain in the army of the East India Company early in the nineteenth century, another became Rector of the Aberdeen Grammar School.

My grandfather, John Mavor, was born in New Deer in 1797. He married Elizabeth Ingram of the same place, and moved to New Aberdour about 1820. His eldest son, Alexander, who died at an early age, had some local reputation as a mathematician. His second son, John, became a teacher and went to North Shields, where he became Chairman of the School Board. He also had mathematical talent. My father, James, also became a teacher, after going to Glasgow at an early age for his education. The youngest son, William, died while a law student at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Among the contemporaries of these youths in New Aberdour was William Henderson, who became Provost of Aberdeen.1

My grandmother's family, the Ingrams, had a somewhat similar history. One of her brothers went to Peterhead and became the owner of a fleet of fishing-smacks. His principal business was the exportation of herring and haddock to Hamburg. His son and successor went often in the course of his business to Germany, and on one of these occasions, about 1870, he learned that at one time there had been erected in Berlin a bronze statue of James Keith, FieldMarshal under Frederick the Great. This statue had disappeared. After painstaking researches, Ingram discovered the statue in the basement of one of the public buildings in Berlin. Long negotiations ensued; and by the aid of the British Ambassador, the statue was secured, transported to Peterhead, and erected by Ingram on a granite pedestal in the market-place. Ingram was at the time Provost of the town. Another of my grandmother's brothers emigrated to Canada about 1835, and founded a place which he called New Aberdour on the Saugeen river in Ontario. This Ingram came to visit us in Glasgow in 1865, and recounted his experiences of thirty years before in hewing his way through the Canadian forest to the spot where he settled. Another of my grandmother's relatives went from New Deer to the United States. His son went to China as a medical missionary about

1 Sir William Henderson of Devanha died about 1900. My aunt Ann, wife of John Mavor, was Sir Wm. Henderson's sister. She died in London in 1917 at the age of ninety-eight.

• Field-Marshal Keith was killed at the battle of Hoch Kirchen in 1758. He was a son of the ninth and only brother of the tenth and last Earl Marischal of Scotland. The Keiths had been Marischals of Scotland from the year 1010. Their seat was Keithhall, near Inverurie. For eight hundred years this family had contributed many persons of distinction to the public life of Scotland.

1880.1 Other Ingrams from New Deer and from the neighbourhood of New Aberdour were similarly scattered.

This family history, with its early and wide separations, is by no means unique. It is the usual history of Aberdeenshire families. A spot on the face of the earth to which some Aberdonian has not penetrated would be difficult to find.

1I met Dr. Ingram at Kalgan, on the Mongolian frontier of China, in 1910 (cf. vol. ii. p. 335).