have been to me."

Lady Grisell Baillie lived through the '15 and the '45, and those who
suffered in the first of those years had the kindest of friends and
helpers in her large-minded husband and in herself. She was eighty at
the time of the '45, but during that year and during the next, when her
death took place, she helped by every means in her power those who had
suffered from fighting for a cause that was dear to their hearts. She
always remembered what she herself had gone through. "Full of years, and
of good works," as her somewhat pompous epitaph has it, Lady Grisell
Baillie died in December 1746, and was buried at Mellerstain on the day
upon which she should have celebrated her eighty-second birthday. And
surely the angels who, on that first Christmas Eve, long, long ago, sang
of "Peace on earth--goodwill towards men," must have been very near when
she, who was a Christmas baby, and whose whole long life had been one of
love and of peace, of goodwill and of charity to others, was laid in the
earth as the snowflakes fell, on Christmas Day, one hundred and
sixty-eight years ago.

KINMONT WILLIE

A venerable and highly respected Scottish professor of literature was
once asked what was his ruling passion--his heart's desire? If the
secrets of his soul could be laid bare, what, above all, would be found
to be his predominant wish? The question was an indiscreet one, but he
was tolerant. He tightly compressed his gentle mouth, and firmly
readjusted his gold-rimmed glasses.

"I _wish_" said he, "to be a corsair."

It would have been interesting to know how many of a following he would
have had from sedate academic circles had he been given his heart's
desire and had sailed down the Clyde with the raw head and bloody bones
showing on the black flag that flew at his mast-head. How many of us are
there with whom law-abiding habits, decorous respectability, form but a
thin covering of ice over unplumbed depths of lawless desire? Not long
since, when a wretched criminal case in which the disappearance of a
pearl necklace was involved, was agitating every Scottish club and
tea-table, a charming old Scottish lady, whose career from childhood up
has been one of unblemished virtue, was heard to bemoan the manner of
commission of the crime. "She did it _very_ stupidly. Now, if _I_ had
been doing it I should"--And her astounded auditors listened to an able
exposition of the way in which she would successfully have