Meantime, I, on my part, kept his house and overlooked the parish school, and another which we had set up down at the Cove for the little children who would not come so far in bad weather. I tried, too, to teach the gospel of cleanliness as I had learned it in Holland, but here I had indifferent success. 'Twas so much easier to cover the floors with rushes than to sweep them every day and scrub them twice a week; and as to the ill smells and the vermin, why they were used to them. However, I did make some progress with the young ones, and I soon came to the conclusion that it was not worth while to push my zeal too far. The good women liked their maids to learn sewing and knitting, mending and shaping, and they were well pleased when I taught some of them, as a reward, to make a serviceable kind of lace with the needle. The maids learned to read, and some of them to write, and to reckon in their heads. By and by we had a boy's school taught by a young man sent us by my lord. It was not so well attended as the other, for the farmers and fishers were not willing to spare their lads after they were old enough to be useful, but yet we turned out some good scholars. My husband was a musician like all the Corbets, and the school master was also a singer. So we had some good music in the church. On the whole, it was a happy time. I will not deny that I was now and then homesick, especially when three or four times a year I had a packet from Holland. Avice was usually the writer, and a capital correspondent she was, telling me all the news of our old neighbors, and every thing that happened in the family. Garrett Van Alstine wrote to my husband and told him what was going on in church and State, and 'twas plain to see that he was by no means easy in his mind. The emperor had, indeed, not abdicated in favor of his son, but he was always talking of it, and, as he grew older, and more feeble in mind and body, he came more and more under the influence of the priests. There were restrictions placed upon the printing and sale of Protestant books, and threatening rumors as to the breaking up of Protestant congregations. Avice wrote that their neighbors of the old church, with whom they had over lived in friendship and harmony, began to look coldly on them and to withdraw from their intimacy, and that Margaret Hall's school at Amsterdam had been almost broken up. On the whole, we wore not sorry that we had returned to England, where, though matters of state were somewhat unsettled, we had no fear of persecution for the truth's sake.