little brae. But I speak from hearsay no longer; I knew my mother
for ever now.

That is how she got her soft face and her pathetic ways and her
large charity, and why other mothers ran to her when they had lost
a child. 'Dinna greet, poor Janet,' she would say to them; and
they would answer, 'Ah, Margaret, but you're greeting yoursel.'
Margaret Ogilvy had been her maiden name, and after the Scotch
custom she was still Margaret Ogilvy to her old friends. Margaret
Ogilvy I loved to name her. Often when I was a boy, 'Margaret
Ogilvy, are you there?' I would call up the stair.

She was always delicate from that hour, and for many months she was
very ill. I have heard that the first thing she expressed a wish
to see was the christening robe, and she looked long at it and then
turned her face to the wall. That was what made me as a boy think
of it always as the robe in which he was christened, but I knew
later that we had all been christened in it, from the oldest of the
family to the youngest, between whom stood twenty years. Hundreds
of other children were christened in it also, such robes being then
a rare possession, and the lending of ours among my mother's
glories. It was carried carefully from house to house, as if it
were itself a child; my mother made much of it, smoothed it out,
petted it, smiled to it before putting it into the arms of those to
whom it was being lent; she was in our pew to see it borne
magnificently (something inside it now) down the aisle to the
pulpit-side, when a stir of expectancy went through the church and
we kicked each other's feet beneath the book-board but were
reverent in the face; and however the child might behave, laughing
brazenly or skirling to its mother's shame, and whatever the father