r Carmichael
(afterward Countess of Glenmore) were:

"And will ye go Love's Way with me"--written directly after the
visit to Allan-Lough--and

"Here awa! There awa! Daffy-Down-Dilly O!" one of the quaintest
bits of loving child rhyme in all the Scots tongue, composed soon
after the birth of her first child, Danvers Carmichael, Jr.

She shook her head.

"That's by with forever, Jock; I shall never write again," she
answered.

"No more verse-making?" I inquired.

"Never any more--unless it be to say to women this."

She stood, with her hands folded before her, a beautiful fulfilled
Nancy, looking down at us with sweetest earnestness, her children
leaning against her as she spoke.

"I should write: I, Nancy Stair-Carmichael, have learned that
verse-making and verse-singing and the publicity that goes with them do
not make me a finer woman; I have learned that my woman's body is not
strong enough for the mental excitement of that existence, and to be a
daughter, a wife and a mother, as well, and that God in his goodness
sent a certain great poet into my life to show me that gift is nothing
beside womanhood.

"And I would reason with all these dear other women like this:

"Suppose I write certain verses! Where will my lines be two hundred
years from now? Forgotten words of unimmediate things. But suppose my
heart spoke to me, and knowing I could do but one work well, I put all
childish ambition aside to become the mother of men, that centuries
from now thousands of my children may be fighting for the right of
present issues and hastening that Divine Outcome for which God made us
all.

"And I would say to them: the night I knew another woman was to be the
mother----" she paused abruptly, for she had been so carried away by
her own thought as to forget where this might lead. She was a great
woman, but to the end of her life could never bring herself to name the
fact that Danvers had had another wife.

"That night," she continued, slurring the statement over, "I learned
more about life than the classics ever taught me.

"And I would write, as well, something about the trial, to say to them
that when Danvers's life was at stake I had no thought but to save him.
Right or wrong, innocent or guilty, the only thing I wanted was that he
might be free.

"And by this thing I found the unfitness of women to handle public
affairs, for the tender hearts, which make good wives and mot