s neighbours as well as with her, only they had not observed it. But
she had not only an eye to see but a mind and a heart to observe also.
She had a heart that, like the fabled Philosopher's Stone, turned all it
touched and all that touched it immediately to fine gold. Riding home
late one night from a hunting supper-party, young Lord Boyd saw his
mother's candle still burning, and he made bold to knock at her door to
ask why she was not asleep. Without saying a word, she took her son by
the hand and set him down at her table and pointed him to the wet sheet
she had just written. When he had read it he rose, without speaking a
word, and went to his own room, and though that night was never all their
days spoken of to one another, yet all his days Lord Boyd looked back on
that night of the hunt as being the night when his soul escaped from the
snare of the fowler. I much fear the diary is lost, but it would be well
worth the trouble of the owner of Ardross Castle to cause a careful
search to be made for it in the old charter chests of the family.

Till Lady Boyd's lost diary is recovered to us let us gather a few things
about this remarkable woman out of the letters and reminiscences of such
men as Livingstone and Rutherford and her namesake, Principal Boyd of
Trochrig. Rutherford, especially, was, next to her midnight page, her
ladyship's confidential and bosom friend. 'Now Madam,' he writes in a
letter from Aberdeen, 'for your ladyship's own case.' And then he
addresses himself in his finest style to console his correspondent,
regarding some of the deepest and most painful incidents of her rare and
genuine Christian experience. 'Yes,' he says, 'be sorry at corruption,
and be not secure about yourself as long as any of it is there.'
Corruption, in this connection, is a figure of speech. It is a kind of
technical term much in vogue with spiritual writers of the profounder
kind. It expresses to those unhappy persons who have the thing in
themselves, and who are also familiar with the Scriptural and
experimental use of the word--to them it expresses with fearful truth and
power the sinfulness of their own hearts, as that sinfulness abides and
breaks out continually. Now, how could Lady Boyd, being the woman she
was, but be sorry and inconsolably sorry to find all that in her own
heart every day? No wonder that she and her son never referred to what
she had written and he had read in his mother's lockfast book t