to save his ship.  They never saw him again until they landed at the Brill.  That night the two girls set out on foot to tramp the weary miles to Rotterdam, a gentleman refugee from Scotland, who had come over in the same boat, acting as their escort.  The stormy weather of the North Sea had followed them to land.  It was a cold, wet, dirty night, and Julian Home, still frail from illness, soon lost her shoes in the mud.  There was but one solution to the difficulty.  The gentleman shouldered their baggage along with his own; Grisell shouldered her sister, and carried her all the rest of those weary miles.  At Rotterdam they found Sir Patrick Home and his eldest son awaiting them, to take them on to their new home in Utrecht, and wet and cold and tiredness were all forgotten at the sight of those dear faces, and Grisell “felt nothing but happiness and contentment.”

For three years and a half they lived in Utrecht, and once again during that time Grisell voyaged to Scotland to see to her father’s business affairs.  It is difficult to discover what, during the rest of that time, she did not do for her parents and family.  There were many Scottish refugees then in Holland, and the Homes kept open house, and spent nearly a fourth part of their income on a mansion sufficiently commodious to allow of their hospitalities.  This made it impossible for them to keep any servant save a little girl who washed the dishes, and consequently Grisell acted as cook, housekeeper, housemaid, washerwoman, laundress, dressmaker, and tailoress.  Twice a week she sat up at night to do the family accounts.  Daily she rose before six, went to the market and to the mill to see their own corn ground, and—­in the words of her daughter, who proudly tells the tale—­“dressed the linen, cleaned the house, made ready the dinner, mended the children’s stockings and other clothes, made what she could for them, and in short did everything.”  She was very musical and loved playing and singing, but when, for a small sum, a harpsichord was bought, it was her younger sister, Christian, who was the performer, and by it “diverted” her parents, and the girls had many a joke over their different occupations.  Yet even with all her other work she found time to take an occasional lesson in French and Dutch from her father along with the younger ones, and even wrote a book of songs—­many of them half written, broken off in the middle of a sentence as a pot boiled over or an iron grew hot enough to use.  Some of them are dear to us still.  Do we ever think of all the hardships that were nobly endured by a Scottish girl two hundred years ago when we quote the words of her exquisite song?—­

     “Were na my heart licht, I wad dee.”