et babys that I never was to see
them more?" "I received," she begins her next, "the mournful news of
my dear Jessie's death. I also received the hair of my three sweet
babys, which I will preserve as dear to their memorys and as a token
of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson's friendship and esteem. At my leisure
hours, when the children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I
dream of them. About two weeks ago, I dreamed that my sweet little
Jessie came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my
arms. O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in
heaven, we would not repine nor grieve for their loss."

By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of obvious
sense and human value, but hateful to the present biographer, because he
wrote so many letters and conveyed so little information, summed up this
first period of affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: "Your dear sister
but a little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming
creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope that one
day they should fill active stations in society and become an ornament
in the Church below. But ah!"

Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and for
not much less a period the tears have been dried. And to this day,
looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the sound of many
soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost. Never was such a massacre of
the innocents; teething and chincough and scarlet fever and small-pox
ran the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like
moths about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents
deplore and recall the little losses of their own. "It is impossible to
describe the Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his
life," writes Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith. "Never--never, my dear aunt,
could I wish to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never,
my dear aunt!" And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the
survivors are buried in one grave.

There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a single
funeral seemed but a small event to these "veterans in affliction"; and
by 1816 the nursery was full again. Seven little hopefuls enlivened the
house; some were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already
wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and
to the elder boys he had begun to print, wit