exercises, and have reason to bless God my reason was preserved and health now more than belongs to my age.” And again: “As for me, I sit in my black chair, weak, old, and contented. Though my body is not portable, I visit you in my prayers and in my cups.” She tells us that one of her occasional servants, to wit, the waterwife, so called because she brought the daily supply of water up those interminable stairs, was frequently tipsy and of no good repute. She discharged her, yet she reappeared and was evidently favoured by the other servants; this was because she had adopted a foundling called Christie Fletcher, as she was first discovered on a stair in Fletcher’s Land. The child had fine eyes, and was otherwise so attractive that Mrs. Cockburn got her into the Orphan Hospital. “By the account,” she grimly remarks, “of that house, I think if our young ladies were educated there, it would make a general reform of manners.” [Illustration: MRS. ALISON COCKBURN, From a Photograph] She heard Colonel Reid (afterwards General Reid and the founder of the chair of Music in the University, where the annual Reid concerts perpetuate his name) play on the flute. “It thrills to your very heart, it speaks all languages, it comes from the heart to the heart. I never could have conceived, it had a dying fall. I can think of nothing but that flute.” Mrs. Cockburn saw Sir Walter Scott when he was six, and was astonished at his precocity. He described her as “a virtuoso like myself,” and defined a virtuoso as “one who wishes and will know everything.” The other and superior set of _The Flowers of the Forest_ was written by Miss Jean Elliot, who lived from 1727 till 1805. The story is that she was the last Edinburgh lady who kept a private sedan chair in her “lobby.” In this she was borne through the town by the last of the caddies. The honour of the last sedan chair is likewise claimed for Lady Don who lived in George Square; probably there were two “lasts.” Those Edinburgh aristocratic lady writers had many points in common; they mainly got fame by one song, they made a dead secret of authorship, half because they were shy, half because they were proud. Caroline Baroness Nairne was more prolific than the others, for _The Land of the Leal, Caller Herrin’_ (the refrain to which was caught from the chimes of St. Giles’), _The Auld Hoose_, and _John Tod_ almost reach the high level of masterpieces, but she was as determined as the others to keep it dark. Her very husband did not know she was an authoress; she wrote as Mrs. Bogan of Bogan. In another direction she was rather too daring. She was one of a committee of ladies who proposed to inflict a bowdlerised Burns on the Scots nation. An emasculated _Jolly Beggars_ had made strange reading, but the project fell through.