Her son, now in his twenty-second year, succeeded to the title of his father. With that wondrous solicitude which fills a mother’s heart towards her only child, Lady Nairne had watched the training of her boy; and she had a rich reward. He grew up no mere devotee of mammon, or fashion, or fame, but a youth of good intellectual powers, high moral qualities, and sound religious principles—all that a Christian mother could desire. But alas! this gourd was doomed to perish also. In the spring of 1837, the young baron suffered much from influenza, and for the benefit of his health he went to Brussels, accompanied by his mother. There he caught a severe cold, and after an illness of six weeks, died on the 7th of December, 1837. Her heart bled for her son, but no murmur escaped her lips. She was content that Christ should come into her garden and pluck the sweetest flower. Yet she deeply felt her loss. “I sometimes say to myself,” she wrote to a friend, “this is ‘no me,’ so greatly have my feelings and trains of thought changed since ‘auld lang syne,’ and though I am made to know assuredly that all is well, I scarcely dare to allow my mind to settle on the past.” “Hast thou sounded the depth of yonder sea, And counted the sands that under it be? Hast thou measured the height of heaven above?— Then mayest thou mete out a mother’s love.” After this sad event Lady Nairne might have been seen taking her walk in a cool anteroom, “passing and repassing the bust of her darling son, and stopping as often to gaze on it, then replacing the white handkerchief that covered it to keep it pure.” In her old age Lady Nairne resided chiefly on the Continent, and frequently at Paris; but the last two years of her life were spent at Gask. Feeble in body and worn in spirit, on the verge of another world, where praise or censure is nothing, her interest in the salvation of souls was as fresh as ever. To the teacher of a school where children were daily taught, she thus delivered her sentiments on the great subject of education. “You say they like ‘The Happy Land’ best: is the _gospel_ in it? Repeat it.” Her eager eye watched each line till she should hear what satisfied her. She then said, “It’s pretty, very sweet; but it might be clearer. Remember, unless the work of Christ for them as sinners comes in,—the ransom, the substitution,—what you teach is worthless for their souls.” On Sunday, the 26th of October, 1845, in the mansion house of Gask, she quietly sank to the rest she had so long looked for, at the advanced age of seventy-nine years. Not in the crowded cemetery of the city, where many of the wise, mighty, and noble have been laid down to repose; but in the lovely churchyard among the mountains of her own picturesque county, where the “rude forefathers of the hamlet lie,” did a weeping crowd commit the remains of Lady Nairne to the cold ground. The burial service was read by the Rev. Sir William Dunbar, Bart.