There were so many and so various proposals, that ultimately Mrs. Barrie had to be consulted, and she quietly sounded Bell, who would only speak on the subject after she learned that she could not get out of it, and the result was that a “Paisley shawl” (I think it was also called a Paisley plaid, a “harness” plaid) and a china tea-set were procured.
A meeting of lady subscribers was held in the manse dining-room. As Dr. Stevenson insisted on being admitted, he made the presentation, in what was reported to me as “a real neat wee speech.” Bell’s reply was declared by those present to have been “beautiful”; even Miss Park said it was very becoming and most creditable for a person in Bell’s position. The only fragment of it that I could pick up was that “she would not presume to invite ladies in their station to her plain hoose, but if any o’ them would be kind enough to come, she wad hansel the teapot wi’ a’ her heart.” Dr. Stevenson said, “Remember, Bell, you’ll need to give me a cinder in my last cup.”
Bell did not know that the Doctor referred to a little whisky when he said this. She look puzzled, hospitably puzzled, and said, “A cinder, Doctor! a cinder in your hinmost cup? The coals are unco assy [very ashy] hereabouts, an’ it micht break the cup; but when a’ ither folks are served, I could drop ane into the teapot if that would please ye.”
“I’ll drop it in myself, Bell, if you’ll either give me the key of the cupboard, or put the bottle on the table,” said the Doctor. “The cinder I mean will not burn a cork; it’s ‘barley tea’ or ‘barley bree.’”
“THE TONES OF THE HEART.”
Mrs. Barrie gave Bell as her personal present a brooch of large dimensions, which contained locks of the hair of all the family;—wee Nellie’s was in the middle. There was engraved on the back of the brooch: “From Mrs. Barrie to Isabella Cameron—July 1851. ‘The Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead and with me,’ Ruth i. 8.”
Bell was neither romantic, nor sentimental, nor demonstrative, but when she read the inscription, she kissed the brooch again and again and again, and for several nights after she got it, she often took it from under her pillow, and pressed it to her lips and to her heart.
Mr. Barrie’s present was a Bible in two volumes, and he was bewildered by the number of texts he would like to write on each.
“My dear,” said he to Mrs. Barrie, “I have spent some hours in considering what to write on Bell’s Bible, and have not yet decided, so many texts seem suitable. In the first place, I would like to write the last twenty-one verses of the Book of Proverbs. I have just been reading these, and it seemed to me as if the writer had Bell in his thoughts when he wrote them. It resembles one of those new-fashioned pictures that are taken by the sun now-a-days, called ‘daguerreotypes,’[28] invented by a Frenchman called Daguerre. Could anything more accurately descriptive of even plain homely Bell be imagined than ‘The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,’—‘do him good and not evil all the days of his life,’—‘worketh willingly with her hands,’—‘considereth a field and buyeth it,’—‘reacheth forth her hand to the needy,’—‘in her tongue is the law of kindness,’—‘looketh well to the ways of her household,’—‘eateth not the bread of idleness,’ and so on, my dear,” added he, laying his hand on the Bible. “That is an old Book,—THE old Book,—but its references to human life—the lower as well as the higher life—are as applicable to the life of to-day as they were to that of two thousand years ago. The reading of these verses in the circumstances, and with the object I had in view, has delighted me; I think I never felt so irresistibly convinced that they were written by Him who knew what was in man, and what would suit mankind for all time.”
[28] The original process of photography, in which the picture was taken on a silvered plate. The daguerreotypes required to be held in a certain way to prevent the bright silverized plate from shining so as to confuse the eye, and they could not be used as negatives to take other impressions from, as photographs now are.