day, looking in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the
sound of many soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost. Never was
such a massacre of the innocents; teething and chincough and
scarlet fever and smallpox ran the round; and little Lillies, and
Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths about a candle; and nearly
all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and recall the little
losses of their own. 'It is impossible to describe the Heavnly
looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,' writes
Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith. 'Never--never, my dear aunt, could I
wish to eface the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never,
my dear aunt!' And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of
the survivors are buried in one grave.

There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a
single funeral seemed but a small event to these 'veterans in
affliction'; and by 1816 the nursery was full again. Seven little
hopefuls enlivened the house; some were growing up; to the elder
girl my grandfather already wrote notes in current hand at the tail
of his letters to his wife: and to the elder boys he had begun to
print, with laborious care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic
applications. Here, for instance, under date of 26th May 1816, is
part of a mythological account of London, with a moral for the
three gentlemen, 'Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson,' to
whom the document is addressed:

'There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men. The
natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the
people of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and
instead of taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and