to buy something with my sixpence for my dear Isa Keith.’  Again, when lying very still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished:  ’O yes! if you would just leave the room-door open a wee bit, and play “The Land o’ the Leal,” and I will lie and think, and enjoy myself’ (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine).  Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the parlor.  It was Sabbath evening, and after tea.  My father, who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned her name, took her in his arms; and, while walking her up and down the room, she said, ’Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you like?’ He said, ‘Just choose yourself, Maidie.’  She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase, ’Few are thy days, and full of woe,’ and the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a remarkable choice for a child.  The repeating these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in her soul.  She asked to be allowed to write a poem; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting her eyes.  She pleaded earnestly, ’Just this once’; the point was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote an address of fourteen lines, ’to her loved cousin on the author’s recovery,’ her last work on earth;—­

   ’Oh!  Isa, pain did visit me;
    I was at the last extremity: 
    How often did I think of you,
    I wished your graceful form to view,
    To clasp you in my weak embrace,
    Indeed I thought I’d run my race: 
    Good care, I’m sure, was of me taken,
    But still indeed I was much shaken,
    At last I daily strength did gain,
    And oh! at last, away went pain;
    At length the doctor thought I might
    Stay in the parlor all the night;
    I now continue so to do,
    Farewell to Nancy and to you.’

“She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother’s heart, ‘My head, my head!’ Three days of the dire malady, ‘water in the head,’ followed, and the end came.”

   “Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly.”

It is needless, it is impossible, to add anything to this:  the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child,—­Lady Nairne’s words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; the words of Burns touching the kindred chord, her last numbers “wildly sweet” traced with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend,—­moriens canit,—­and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song’s burden to the end.

   “She set as sets the morning star, which goes
    Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides
    Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
    But melts away into the light of heaven.”