of the West Port, in the very labyrinth of closes in that rank neighbourhood which had been made hideous by the Burke and Hare murders of 1828. Dr. Chalmers alone knew of the gift; no one else. A few months more of invalid existence at Gask House, with failing memory, and somewhat paralytic, and the saintly lady’s life was over. She died October 27, 1845, in the house of Gask, at the age of seventy-nine. Her remains rest in a chapel near that house, erected for Episcopal service on the site of the old parish church, in the midst of the scenery of her native Strathearn, which she loved in life so well. That this woman had ever written a line of verse was a secret which she all but carried to the grave with her. And yet for fifty years, no less, people all round her had been singing her songs and talking about them with admiration, and phrases from them had become household words throughout Scotland, and some of them were universally spoken of as the finest Scottish songs, the songs of keenest and deepest genius, since those of Burns. At how early a period in her life she, who could sing songs so well and who knew so many, may have tried to write one, we cannot tell; but it was in or about the year 1793, when Burns was in the full flush of his fame, and his exertions for improving and reforming Scottish Song by providing new words for old airs had kindled her enthusiasm, that she penned her first known lyric. It was called _The Pleughman_, and was written to be sung by her brother at a dinner of the Gask tenantry. Having been successful in that form, it was afterwards circulated by him, but with every precaution for keeping it anonymous. Had Burns lived a year longer than he did, he might have heard not only of this _Pleughman_, but also of another song from the same unknown hand that would have touched him a thousand times more, as it has touched all the world since,—_The Land o’ the Leal._ That song was written, it is believed, by Carolina Oliphant in 1797, when she was in her thirty-second year. Had the fact been known, how she would have been honoured and pointed at everywhere, all her life after, wherever she went! But the secret was kept; _The Land o’ the Leal_ came to be attributed to Burns, and was printed at last in editions of Burns as indubitably his; and the true authoress came into Edinburgh, to live in that city, close to Scott, for four-and-twenty years; and through all that time _he_, who would have limped across the room with beaming eyes to single her out in chief had he been aware of the reality, remained ignorant that the handsome, but no longer young, lady whom he sometimes met at Ravelston had any other distinction than that of being the sister-in-law of Sandy Keith, and the wife of Major Nairne, Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks. Yet this very time of her residence in Edinburgh as Mrs. Nairne was the time also, it appears, of the production of not a few additional songs of hers, some of them