“It is more affecting than we care to say to read her mother’s and Isabella Keith’s letters written immediately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now; but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of affection which only women, and Shakespeare, and Luther can use--that power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss.” Fifty years after Marjorie’s death her sister, writing to Dr. Brown, said: “My mother was struck by the patient quietness manifested by Marjorie during this illness, unlike her ardent, impulsive nature; but love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When Dr. Johnstone rewarded her submissiveness with a sixpence, the request speedily followed that she might get out ere New Year’s Day came. When asked why she was so desirous of getting out, she immediately rejoined: ‘Oh, I am so anxious to buy something with my sixpence for my dear Isa Keith.’ Again, when lying very still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished: ‘Oh yes, if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play the _Land o’ the Leal_, and I will lie and _think_ and enjoy myself’ (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father, who idolized this child, and never afterward in my hearing mentioned her name, took her in his arms; and while walking her up and down the room she said: ‘Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you like?’ He said, ‘Just choose for yourself, Maidie.’ She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase, ‘Few are thy days and full of woe,’ and the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter; a remarkable choice for a child. The repeating of these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a poem. There was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, ‘Just this once’; the point was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote an address of fourteen lines ‘To my loved cousin on the author’s recovery.’” The cousin was Isa Keith. “She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother’s heart, ‘My head, my head!’ Three days of the dire malady, ‘water in the head,’ followed, and the end came.” ----- Footnote 17: _Marjorie Fleming._ By L. MacBean. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers, London and New York. Permission to use the extracts quoted from Marjorie’s Journal in this article has been granted me by the publishers. Footnote 18: It is a whole century since the dimly conscious little prophet said it, but the pathos of it is still there. ADAM’S SOLILOQUY