unlike her ardent, impulsive nature; but
love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When lying very still, her
mother asked her if there was anything she wished: 'Oh yes! if you would
just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the
Leal,' and I will lie and _think_, and enjoy myself' (this is just as
stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to
parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the
nursery to the parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father,
who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned
her name, took her in his arms; and while walking up and down the room,
she said, 'Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you
like?' He said, 'Just choose yourself, Maidie.' She hesitated for a
moment between the paraphrase 'Few are thy days, and full of woe,' and
the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a
remarkable choice for a child. The repeating these lines seemed to stir
up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a
poem; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case
of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, 'Just this once;' the point
was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote
an address of fourteen lines, 'To her loved cousin on the author's
recovery,' her last work on earth:--

'Oh! Isa, pain did visit me,
I was at the last extremity;
How often did I think of you,
I wished your graceful form to view,
To clasp you in my weak embrace,
Indeed I thought I'd run my race:
Good care, I'm sure, was of me taken,
But still indeed I was much shaken.
At last I daily strength did gain,
And oh! at last, away went pain;
At length the doctor thought I might
Stay in the parlor all the night;
I now continue so to do;
Farewell to Nancy and to you.'

She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with
the old cry of woe to a mother's heart, 'My head, my head!' Three days
of the dire malady 'water in the head' followed, and the end came."

"Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly!"

It is needless, it is impossible to add anything to this; the fervor,
the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye,
the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling
child; Lady Nairne's words, and the ol