Grisell Home was Lady Grisell Baillie when, in 1703, her mother died.
"Where is Grisell," she asked, almost with her latest breath. And when
Lady Grisell came and held her hand the old lady said, "My dear Grisell,
blessed be you above all, for a helpful child you have been to me."
Lady Grisell Baillie lived through the '15 and the '45, and those who
suffered in the first of those years had the kindest of friends and
helpers in her large-minded husband and in herself. She was eighty at
the time of the '45, but during that year and during the next, when her
death took place, she helped by every means in her power those who had
suffered from fighting for a cause that was dear to their hearts. She
always remembered what she herself had gone through. "Full of years, and
of good works," as her somewhat pompous epitaph has it, Lady Grisell
Baillie died in December 1746, and was buried at Mellerstain on the day
upon which she should have celebrated her eighty-second birthday. And
surely the angels who, on that first Christmas Eve, long, long ago, sang
of "Peace on earth--goodwill towards men," must have been very near when
she, who was a Christmas baby, and whose whole long life had been one of
love and of peace, of goodwill and of charity to others, was laid in the
earth as the snowflakes fell, on Christmas Day, one hundred and
sixty-eight years ago.
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