t at her (or
rather at her husband's) dinner-parties. It is conceivable that even my
grandmother was amenable to the seductions of dress; at least I find her
husband inquiring anxiously about "the gowns from Glasgow," and very
careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he had
seen in church "in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of cloth as
the Boys' Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons; the hat or
Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had a plume of
three white feathers." But all this leaves a blank impression, and it is
rather by reading backward in these old musty letters, which have moved
me now to laughter and now to impatience, that I glean occasional
glimpses of how she seemed to her contemporaries, and trace (at work in
her queer world of godly and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive
nature. Fashion moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we
sometimes think; but a little while ago, and, in some circles, women
stood or fell by the degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in
the early years of the century (and surely with more reason) a character
like that of my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain
of music, the hearts of the men of her own household. And there is
little doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life of
her son and her step-daughter, and numbered the heads in their
increasing nursery, must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.

Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing that
one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as "a veteran in
affliction"; and they were all before middle life experienced in that
form of service. By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair of
still-born twins, five children had been born and still survived to the
young couple. By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had
followed, and the two others were still in danger. In the letters of a
former nurserymaid--I give her name, Jean Mitchell, _honoris causa_--we
are enabled to feel, even at this distance of time, some of the
bitterness of that month of bereavement.

"I have this day received," she writes to Miss Janet, "the melancholy
news of my dear babys' deaths. My heart is like to break for my dear
Mrs. Stevenson. O may she be supported on this trying occasion! I
hope her other three babys will be spared to her. O, Miss Smith, did
I think when I parted from my swe