noble
idea, a manly longing for that one woman, of whose soul and his own, he
could say--

'Once and beyond recollection,
Once ere the skies were unfurled,
These an immortal affection
Found at the birth of the world,'

a woman who would be what his mother was to his father, a something as
sacred as all through his life that mother was to him. Save that Mrs
Thomas Stevenson's eyes were rather hazel than blue, it might have been
of her that the late Professor Blackie wrote so sweetly:--

'True to herself and to the high ideal
That God's grace gave her to inform the real,
True to her kind, and to your every feeling
Respondent with a power of kindliest healing
She knows no falseness, even the courtliest lie;
She dreams not, truth flows from her deep blue eye,
And if her tongue speaks pleasant things to all,
'Tis that she loveth well both great and small,
And all in her that mortals call politeness
Is but the image of her bright soul's brightness.'

That Stevenson home was to many of us, besides the son of the house, a
picture of what a true life ought to be, and one that seemed to make the
realisation of all high ideals possible in whatever fashion one's own
existence might ultimately be led.

There was something so strong and manly in Mr Thomas Stevenson,
something so sweetly womanly in his wife. A beautiful woman always,
because hers was the beauty of soul, as well as of feature, in those
early seventies, one cannot imagine anyone more graceful, more gracious,
or more charming than she was.

It would also be difficult to imagine a wife or mother more sympathetic
or more sensible. She could always see the fun of things; she never
objected to clubs and men's dinners, and the excuse for a night away
from the home hearth, that is so dear to the best of men.

Not many weeks before her death, when we were talking of those happy
days of long ago, she told me that she always took a book and contented
herself, and then was ready to be interested when the truant returned
with a latch-key. An example, that if closely followed, would assuredly
make for domestic peace. And one fancies that the woman who said
smilingly, she always much approved of 'The Evening Club,' because her
husband or son could make merry there so late, that she was sound
asleep, and could not miss their conversation, was likely to be a
pleasant wife to live with, and an