Looking down the years to come we saw other Sandy Carmichaels and other Jock Stairs together in the bare old playground we had known; saw splendid men and women, born of our son and daughter, making the world better and stronger for our having lived, and the joy within me was so strong that the tears stood in my eyes and trembled down my face. Turning suddenly, I found Sandy as moist-eyed as myself, and while the service was being read I reached toward him, and we stood, hands gripped, until the end, in memory of our dead youth and of our friendship that could never die. * * * * * And like an old man who tells a tale limpingly, and covers the ground again to make its points clear to the listener, I set down a scene some five years later in the grounds of Stair. We were all there, Nancy and Danvers, Sandy, Pitcairn, and myself--and two Newcomers, the most spoiled and petted children, it is my belief, upon the entire earth. "I had a letter from Pailey to-day, Nancy," said I, "proposing a third edition of your poems."[11] [11] The last published poems written by Nancy Stair Carmichael (afterward Countess of Glenmore) were: "And will ye go Love's Way with me"--written directly after the visit to Allan-Lough--and "Here awa! There awa! Daffy-Down-Dilly O!" one of the quaintest bits of loving child rhyme in all the Scots tongue, composed soon after the birth of her first child, Danvers Carmichael, Jr. She shook her head. "That's by with forever, Jock; I shall never write again," she answered. "No more verse-making?" I inquired. "Never any more--unless it be to say to women this." She stood, with her hands folded before her, a beautiful fulfilled Nancy, looking down at us with sweetest earnestness, her children leaning against her as she spoke. "I should write: I, Nancy Stair-Carmichael, have learned that verse-making and verse-singing and the publicity that goes with them do not make me a finer woman; I have learned that my woman's body is not strong enough for the mental excitement of that existence, and to be a daughter, a wife and a mother, as well, and that God in his goodness sent a certain great poet into my life to show me that gift is nothing beside womanhood. "And I would reason with all these dear other women like this: "Suppose I write certain verses! Where will my lines be two hundred years from now? Forgotten words of unimmediate things. But suppose my heart spoke to me, and knowing I could do but one work well, I put all childish ambition aside to become the mother of men, that centuries from now thousands of my children may be fighting for the right of present issues and hastening that Divine Outcome for which God made us all.