Records of the clan and name of Fergusson, Ferguson and Fergus

FERGUSSONS IN BALQUHIDDER 235
much success, several prominent public men in Stirling at
the present day having been his pupils.
The following sketch of his life, from the pen of the Rev.
R. Menzies Fergusson, M. A., of Logie, appeared in the Celtic
Monthly for November 1893 : —
' Robert Fergusson, now of Stirling was born in 1819, at
East Stronvar, Balquhidder. He is what would be considered
an old man; yet though his locks are white his heart is
young, and his nature buoyant and simple as that of a youth.
Age cannot wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of his
ways for promoting things Highland. A poet, he loves the
music of the Gael, and learned early to sympathise with
nature, as he roamed amid the hills and beside the mountain
torrents of his native glen. The parish school — at that time
close to the churchyard — received him as a faithful scholar,
quick to learn, and well acquainted with the Gaelic tongue,
which was taught him by his father. In the competition in
that language in 1834 he gained the first prize. His educa-
tion was continued in Stirling, the grey " City of the Rock,"
and in 1856-7-8 he passed through the Free Church Training
College in Edinburgh. His profession of a schoolmaster was,
however, begun at Dalveich, Lochearnside, in 1836, where Mr.
Fergusson had the honour of having two future poets as his
pupils— the late Rev. Samuel Fergusson of Fortingall, author
of The Queens Visit and other Poems, and Mr. Donald
M'Laren, Ardveich, whose songs and poems are all in Gaelic.
For some time Mr. Fergusson taught the school of Strathyre,
hallowed with memories of Dugald Buchanan, the Cowper of
the Highlands, whose Spiritual Songs are well known to all
lovers of Gaelic poetry, and in whose memory the subject of
our sketch was instrumental in raising a memorial fountain,
which has its site near to the railway station. From 1842 to
1846 he was a teacher in Stirling, and in the neighbourhood
of Dunfermline from 1846 to 1856, where his love for song
and poetry was greatly fostered through intercourse with
D. K. Coutts, his then school assistant, and afterwards master
of Dr. Bell's School, Leith. In this school he was again
favoured with another poet in one of his pupils — Mr. J.
Millar, now of London, author of Zigzag and My Lawyer,