Church of St. John thk Bai'tiist, Dalry. 75 



an office not hereditary, but tenable only duiing the lifetime of an 

 individual, it would be quite otherwise ; and it appears to lue tliat 

 no subsequent descendant would be at all entitled to credit the 

 family with the continued use of a distinction valid only during 

 the lifetime of an ancestor. The real gist of the question then 

 comes to be, that, in this peculiar combination of private and pro- 

 vincial arms, do we find a test of the period when, and the individual 

 by whom, this aisle was erected, and, is that tradition about the 

 grille being three hundred j^ears old a fact, and not a fancy ? 

 According to the evidence adduced, the erection of the aisle 

 must have fallen within the lifetime of the Justiciar, and if the 

 view be adopted, that the lion rampant represents the undiffer- 

 enced arms of Home, then its erection must be further limited to 

 the lifetime of the Justiciar's fii"st wife, Juliana. We may well 

 believe that by way of reconciling- both theories, Sir John rose to 

 the humour of the situation, and impaled a cognizance appropriate 

 alike to his wife, as a Home, and to the Province. So far as, in 

 its severe simplicity, the style can be any guide — the aisle 

 might just as well have been erected in the iGtli as in the 17th 

 century, and I trust that some of the members of the Society may 

 be able to throw light on so interesting- a topic. 



I need scarcely remind the members of the Society that one 

 great source of interest, not only in the church— now, alas ! no 

 more — but in the entire group of residential and other buildings 

 associated with it, known in mediaeval times as St. John's Clachan. 

 was the fact that it lay on the great, and, in these early times, the 

 only, highway of communication between the central districts of 

 Scotland and its far south-west extremity, AVigtonshire. It was, 

 indeed, a kind of half-way house to all those gentle or semple. 

 royal or plebeian, who had occasion to traverse the wild and moun- 

 tainous district, called the southern highlands, a journey by no means 

 without peril of many kinds, from Nature in her wildest moods to 

 the not less real dangei's of an ever lawless and unsettled state of 

 society. We may well believe that if the full romance of that 

 road could be told in the varied incidents befalling the countless 

 thousands who traversed it, the narrative would far outvie the 

 most stirring of Chaucer's tales. More especially was this the 

 route undeviatingly followed by the Scottish Kings in the pilgrim- 

 ages they so frequently made to the shrine of St. Ninian ; and not 

 by kings only, but nobles and ecclesiastics of every rank and 



