l, you who have had the raising of me,
how do you like the work of your hands?"

"Ye can not throw us off our guard by braw clothes, Lady," Sandy
responded, with a laugh, "for we know you only too well, and to our
distress of mind and pocket. Ye're a spoiled bit, in spite of the
severe discipline your father and I have reared ye by. Here's a thing I
got from a peddler-body for ye," he ended.

She opened the morocco case which he handed her, to find a necklet of
pearls with diamonds clasping them, and the tears came into her eyes as
she kissed him for the gift.

"I can not thank ye enough!--never, in all my life--for all ye've done
for me, Sandy. I love you," she says, "and well you know it; and with
that we'll go to dinner. I go with Jamie," she added, slipping her arm
through his, "for ye must learn that genius ever goes before wealth and
titles," and with a laugh she and Jamie Henderlin went out before us.

After dinner we sat outside for a while, Sandy and I smoking, as Nancy
and Jamie talked of the outer world and the celebrities of London and
Paris. The lamps from the little settlement on the burn twinkled
through the trees, while farther off the lights from the town of
Edinburgh shone soft and silvery beneath the glimmering moon. We could
hear the bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the cows in the long
lane down by the Holm and the bells of the old Tron deaving our ears by
striking the hour of eight.

There is little use, with Jamie playing to the greatest people of the
world at the moment of my writing, for me to tell the surprise and
delight we had in his music; or the new joy that Sandy felt in Nancy's
singing, it being the first time he had heard her voice for over two
years.

"Do you want to hear some of my own verses?" she asked him at length.
"Mr. Thomson has been kind enough to set some of them to music." And
then she sang, for the first time to my hearing, those two songs of
hers which were afterward whistled, sung, hummed, or shouted by every
one in Scotland, from the judge on the bench to the caddie on the
streets:

Soutar Sandy,
Wed wi' Mandy
On a Monday morning,

and the set of three double verses, since published in the Glasgow
Sentinel, "The Maid wi' the Wistfu' Eye,"[4] which, as I hope for
Heaven, Rab Burns told me one night at Creech's he envied her for
having written.

[4] Poems by Nancy Stair, Pailey Edition, pages 44, 67.

Suddenly, as she was looking over