Memorial of the Clan of the Bells

48
implanted in the human breast by the same hand that wrote on stone amid the
thunders of Sinai,
" Honour thy father and thy mother."
Who dares confess himself so utterly sunk in brutish selfishness as not to
wish to look up to or look back to his parents with veneration, nor to care for
the fair fame of brother or sister, or that his owu children should recollect and
respect him ? It is merely an extension of the opposite feeling that prompts
the Scot to look a little further with a peculiar interest to his grandparents and
their forebears, to his cousins and their clan. Should any worthy clansman
meet a man believed — really believed — to have nothing of this in him, mark him
and beware of him. He would sell his country, betray his friend, and foul his
own nest for a price.
There is, of course, a reasonable limit to the rigid application of these remarks,
and it is not to be insisted on that every one should trouble himself very much
about one or two out of his fifty thousand ancestors buried five hundred years
ago. It may, perhaps, even be somewhat excusable to regard such remote
ancestors with no greater interest than any of their contemporary fellow-country-
men, and some otherwise very intelligent and right-feeling people would not
give a fig fur a complete collection of the veritable baptismal certificates and
marriage lines of every one of them. In fact, it would be rather dry reading ;
and otherwise it is obvious that common delicacy prescribes the desk or the
farthest library shelf, rather than the drawing-room table, as the proper place
for all books of genealogy or history of the family and connexions of the
household.
Most of the middle classes may be quite content with the ancestry of a very
few respectable generations ; yet this manuscript, and these notes, may enable
some to link on their own pedigrees to one or more of the branches of the Clan
mentioned therein, — and it is hoped the subject will amuse them, and others
for whom these pages are intended.
If the said pages circulate more widely, be it hereby known, it is under
protest ; but if any kindly clansman will collect other scraps that may be within
liis reach, or pleases to work up the foregoing with a collection of his own, he is
requested to send a copy (if letter-press half-a-dozen copies) addressed to B.,
under cover to the printers of this pamphlet, a firm as enterprising and liberal as
any in Father Land or Mother Country, — Saul Solomon & Co., Printers and
Publishers, Government Gazette Office, Cape Town, Cape of Good Hope.
SAUL SOLOMON AND CO., PRINTERS, CAPE TOWN.
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