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 eluded justice.  Is it the story of the villain who is successfully tracked to his doom that attracts us most? or that of the great Raffles and his kind whose villainies almost invariably escape detection, and who burgles with a light and easy touch and the grace and humour of a Claude Duval?  Let us be honest with ourselves.  How many of us really wish to be corsairs?  Which of us would not have been a reiver in the old reiving days?  Have we