Time, who is the great healer, does his work with admirable celerity for some. By the spring of that year, though there came to her in the early weeks of April the astounding news of Burns’s marriage to Jean Armour, Mrs. Maclehose had resumed the peaceful tenor of her blameless existence as a cruelly deserted wife and anxious mother. This little vessel, so lightly rigged, so fairy-like, with sails and pennants spread for none but summer breezes, had encountered rough weather, but had survived with wonderfully little hurt. Helmsman and pilot, perchance, had suffered, and an honest seaman or so gone by the board; but the spirit of the little ship, undaunted, rode lightly on the calm. The little Edinburgh world of Mrs. Maclehose’s acquaintances observed with edification her devotion to her delicate youngest boy. She, indeed, moved herself and her small household to Prestonpans for a season, where he lay. In the August of that year little Danny died, and it may be said most truthfully that no child ever winged his way from earth to heaven from tenderer maternal arms. For all the rest of Nancy’s doings are they not written in more books than one, so that he who runs may read? It is to be conjectured that her relations with her cousin became tacitly somewhat strained after the events recorded in this history, although there was no open quarrel. It seems probable that Herries, after Danny’s death, and in the hardness of heart which grew upon him at this time, withdrew the superfluities, at anyrate, of the monetary assistance he had been in the habit of conveying to his relative. This may have been one of the contributing causes to the curious impulse which, about the autumn of the year ’91, moved Nancy to think of rejoining her long-lost husband, and induced her to undertake a voyage to the West Indies with that laudable end in view. The journey was not a success. She, indeed, found Mr. Maclehose with little difficulty, but she found along with him the partner of his exile, a swarthy lady of those climes, with a numerous coffee-colored progeny. And this discovery so shocked the moral sensibilities of the little lady, who had regarded with a lenient eye the amorous delinquencies of her Sylvander, that she incontinently fled the marital premises, and returned to Leith in the same vessel that had brought her out. The most remarkable feature of this episode is the fact that Robert Burns, although at this time nearly three years married, did indubitably come to Edinburgh to seek a farewell interview with his Clarinda. How they two met, with what feelings, with what memories, who shall be bold enough to say? The world, at least, became infinitely the richer for this parting and for poor Clarinda’s absence. For the poet’s soul was stirred, and soon fine Edinburgh ladies at the harp and spinet, and country lasses at their milking, were singing, to its melting air,—