‘Oh! Isa, pain did visit me, I was at the last extremity; How often did I think of you, I wished your graceful form to view, To clasp you in my weak embrace, Indeed I thought I’d run my race: Good care, I’m sure, was of me taken, But still indeed I was much shaken, At last I daily strength did gain, And oh! at last, away went pain; At length the doctor thought I might Stay in the parlor all the night; I now continue so to do, Farewell to Nancy and to you.’ “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.” “Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly.” It is needless, it is impossible, to add anything to this: the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child,--Lady Nairne’s words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; the words of Burns, touching the kindred chord, her last numbers “wildly sweet” traced, with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend,--_moriens canit_,--and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song’s burden to the end. “She set as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven.” Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: This favorite dog “died about January, 1809, and was buried, in a fine moonlight night, in the little garden behind the house in Castle Street. My wife tells me she remembers the whole family in tears about the grave, as her father himself smoothed the turf above Camp with the saddest face she had ever seen. He had been engaged to dine abroad that day, but apologized on account of the death of ‘a dear old friend.’”--Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_.] [Footnote 2: Applied to a pump when it is dry and its valve has lost its “fang”; from the German, _fangen_, to hold.] [Footnote 3: “Her Bible is before me; _a pair_, as then called; the faded marks are just as she placed them. There is one at David’s lament over Jonathan.”] MARJORIE FLEMING. A SKETCH. BEING THE PAPER ENTITLED “_PET MARJORIE: A STORY OF CHILD-LIFE FIFTY YEARS AGO._” BY JOHN BROWN, M. D., AUTHOR OF “RAB AND HIS FRIENDS.” BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 1864.