During the Jacobite Rising on 1715, Rob Roy came to Aberdeen, and looked up a fellow clansman, Professor Gregory. Rob judged that the Professor’s young son James would make a fine recruit, and offered to take him away; but the anxious father wished only to find some graceful way to refuse, foreseeing otherwise a life of crime for his boy.

Professor Gregory pleaded that James was more delicate than he looked, and Rob agreed to wait. To the father’s relief, Rob Roy never returned to claim his pupil; but the boy grew up to be rather irascible, and friends would joke that it might have been better if Rob had the tutoring of him after all.

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