This visit was followed by many others; and before a year had passed my grandfather won the 'bonnie bride' of the spae-wife's prediction from the very house across whose threshold he had first set foot on entering Edinburgh. They were a very young pair; he only twenty-one and my grandmother just sixteen at their marriage; and how their housekeeping might have prospered or the reverse I do not know, had not Ailie decided to take service with the young couple, and maintained their interests during the wanderings of the next thirty years as faithfully as she had previously guarded the honour of her mistress's house. She was one of the now extinct race of family servants, a sort of factotum in the house, where she did her own work and a good part of every one else's in a wonderfully indefatigable fashion, only reserving to herself the privilege of keeping every one in order, from the master and mistress down to the kitchen wench. To three out of the four generations of our family whom she served, she was 'old Ailie;' and her flowered chintz bedgown and mob-cap survived unaltered far into the era of crinoline and chignon. What stories she had to tell of Madam our great-grandmother, a very grand dame indeed, and well-known card-player; and of a certain Mistress Jean, her favourite heroine, whom some of us recollect as Aunt Moir, a little soft-faced, pink-and-white lady, not so imposing to look upon as the miniature of her powdered mamma, but a beauty nevertheless in her day. She lived at a time when it was the acknowledged fate of all Edinburgh belles to fall a prey to dyspeptic old East Indians, who having been drafted off as raw lads to India, were heard of no more till they returned as nabobs half a century later, to take their pick of the blooming lassies for whom the Scottish capital has ever been justly celebrated.