was doing his best to please, and there is little doubt that he
succeeded. Almost all my grandfather's private letters have been
destroyed. This correspondence has not only been preserved entire,
but stitched up in the same covers with the works of the godly
women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the painful Mrs. Ogle. I
did not think to mention the good dame, but she comes in usefully
as an example. Amongst the treasures of the ladies of my family,
her letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves. I read
about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of
stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that
should be found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it
was her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at
second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in which
my grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert Stevenson,
with his quaint smack of the contemporary 'Sandford and Merton,'
his interest in the whole page of experience, his perpetual quest,
and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a boy, his needless
pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his unfeigned,
unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem to her, in a
comparison, dry and trivial and worldly. And if these letters were
by an exception cherished and preserved, it would be for one or
both of two reasons--because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet
reminders of a time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps
touched, by the writer's guileless efforts to seem spiritually-
minded.

After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so
that the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five
children survived to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.