Yet discipline in this home circle there must have been to keep order in so large and intensely active a family. Aunt Esther sometimes found a want of subordination among the troops. The very cleverness of the children made the problem great. For instance, if she told the boys that they should not be so boisterous, they would be likely to answer by complaining that she did not also try to keep the girls from being so girlsterous. And under cover of this witticism the boys would escape punishment. At one time she wrote to one of the children in a merry mood, “Your father and mother have been gone a fortnight and the crew at home are beginning to grow somewhat mutinous, and I am not sure but I shall be obliged to condemn and hang a half score of them before the return of your father.” In February, 1822, while Harriet was visiting her aunt at Guilford, her older sister, Catherine, wrote to her: “We all want you home very much, but hope you are now where you will learn to stand and sit straight and hear what people say to you, and sit still in your chair, and learn to sew and knit well, and be a good girl in every particular; and if you don’t learn this while you are with your Aunt Harriet, I am afraid you never will.” Then, to offset this rather strenuous piece of advice, Catherine, in relenting mood, added, very much as her father might have done: “Old Puss is very well and sends his respects to you; and Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says that if you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your hand and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us.” This elder sister of Harriet’s was so full of fun that she was the life and joy of the house. Writing to their brother Edward in 1819, she said: “Apropos--last week we interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She has asked for what she calls an ‘epithet’ for the gravestone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows: “Here died our kit Who had a fit, And acted queer. Shot with a gun, Her race is run, And she lies here.” Catherine’s father must have been looking over his daughter’s shoulder as she wrote this, for he added a postscript saying that, as every man must eat his pound of dirt, so he supposed every one must write his quire of nonsense, but that he hoped that soon none but letters so solid and weighty as to earn their postage would be passing to and fro. After this Catherine put on still another postscript and said: “Never mind this, Ned, for Papa loves to laugh as well as any of us, and is quite as much tickled at nonsense as we are.”