her youngest
brother, who might have experienced calf love; so very real, but so
very ineffectual. One of these said to her:--"Oh, Miss Mary, you're
just a delight, you are so witty." Another, when she spoke of some man
who talked such delightful nonsense, said, "If you would only come to
Branxholme I'd talk nonsense to you the haill (whole) day."

When I arrived at the old home I found Aunt Mary vigorously rubbing her
hand and wrist (she had slipped downstairs in a neighbour's house, and
broken her arm, and had to drive home before she could have it set). No
one from the neighbour's house went to accompany her; no one came to
enquire; no message was sent. When she recovered so far as to be able
to be out, she met at Dunbar the gentleman and lady also driving in
their conveyance. They greeted each other, and aunt could not resist
the temptation to say:--"I am so glad to see you, and so glad that you
have spoken to me, for I thought you were so offended at my taking the
liberty of breaking my arm in your house that you did not mean to speak
to me again." This little expression of what the French call malice,
not the English meaning, was the only instance I can recollect of Aunt
Mary's not putting the kindest construction on everybody's words and
actions. But when I think of the love that Aunt Mary gathered to
herself from brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, cousins, and
friends--it seems as if the happiest wife and mother of a large family
could not reckon up as rich stores of affection. She was the unfailing
correspondent of those members of the family who were separated by land
and ocean from the old home, the link that often bound these together,
the most tolerant to their failings, the most liberal in her aid--full
of suggestions, as well as of sympathy. Now, in my Aunt Margaret's
enfeebled state, she was the head of the house and the director of all
things. Although she had differed from the then two single sisters and
the family generally at the time of the disruption of the Church of
Scotland, and gone over to the Free Church, the more intensely
Calvinistic of the two, though accepting the same standards--the
Westminster Confession and the Shorter Catechism--all the harsher
features fell off the living texture of her faith like cold water off a
duck's back. From natural preference she chose for her devotions those
parts of the Bible which I selected with deliberate intention. She
wondered to find so much spiritual