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.