dress; Maidie
rushed in between, crying out, 'Pay (whip) Maidjie as much as you like,
and I'll not say one word; but touch Isy, and I'll roar like a bull!'
Years after Maidie was resting in her grave, my mother used to take me
to the place, and told the story always in the exact same words." This
Jeanie must have been a character. She took great pride in exhibiting
Maidie's brother William's Calvinistic acquirements when nineteen months
old, to the officers of a militia regiment then quartered in Kirkcaldy.
This performance was so amusing that it was often repeated, and the
little theologian was presented by them with a cap and feathers.
Jeanie's glory was "putting him through the carritch" (catechism) in
broad Scotch, beginning at the beginning with "Wha made ye, ma bonnie
man?" For the correctness of this and the three next replies, Jeanie had
no anxiety, but the tone changed to menace, and the closed _nieve_
(fist) was shaken in the child's face as she demanded, "Of what are you
made?" "DIRT," was the answer uniformly given. "Wull ye never learn to
say _dust_, ye thrawn deevil?" with a cuff from the opened hand, was the
as inevitable rejoinder.

Here is Maidie's first letter, before she was six. The spelling is
unaltered, and there are no "commoes."

"MY DEAR ISA,--I now sit down to answer all your kind and beloved
letters which you was so good as to write to me. This is the first time
I ever wrote a letter in my Life. There are a great many Girls in the
Square, and they cry just like a pig when we are under the painfull
necessity of putting it to Death. Miss Potune, a Lady of my acquaintance,
praises me dreadfully. I repeated something out of Dean Swift, and she
said I was fit for the stage, and you may think I was primmed up with
majestick Pride, but upon my word I felt myselfe turn a little
birsay,--birsay is a word which is a word that William composed which is
as you may suppose a little enraged. This horrid fat simpliton says that
my Aunt is beautifull, which is intirely impossible, for that is not her
nature."

What a peppery little pen we wield! What could that have been out of the
Sardonic Dean? What other child of that age would have used "beloved" as
she does? This power of affection, this faculty of _be_loving, and wild
hunger to be beloved comes out more and more. She perilled her all upon
it, and it may have been as well--we know, indeed, that it was far
better--for her that this wealth of love was