I do wish we had just a few more friends. It really is too bad, for we might have known the family at Seven Stones, only two miles off, if they had not been Whigs, and there are five sons and four daughters there. Father would no more think of shaking hands with a Whig (if he knew it) than he would eat roast beef on Good Friday. I should not care. Why should one not have some fun, because old Mr Outhwaite is a Whig? I shall have to keep my book locked up if I tell it all I think, as I have been doing now. I would not have Hatty get hold of it for all the world. And as to my Aunt Kezia--I believe she would whip me and send me to bed if she read only the last page. Here comes Ambrose Catterall up the walk, and I must go down, though I do not expect there will be any fun. He will stay supper, I dare say, and then he and Father will have a game of whist with Sophy and Fanny, and I shall sit by with my sewing, and Hatty will knit and whisper into my ear things that I want to laugh at and dare not. If I did, Father would look up over his cards with a black brow and say "Silence!" in such a tone that I shall wish I was somebody else. Who I don't know-- only not Caroline Courtenay. Father does not like our names--at least mine and Sophy's. Mamma named us, and he says we have both fine romantic silly names. Hatty was called after his mother, and that he likes; and Fanny is after a sister of Mamma's who died young. But Father never gives over growling because one of us was not a boy. "Four girls!" he says: "four girls, and never a lad! Who on earth wants four girls? I'll sell one or two of you cheap, if I can find him." But I don't think he would, if it came to the point. I know, for all his queer speeches sometimes, he is proud of Fanny's good looks, and Sophy's good housekeeping, and even Hatty's pert sayings. I know by the way he chuckles now and then when she says anything particularly smart. I don't know what he is proud of in me, unless it is my manners. Of course, having lived in Carlisle with Grandmamma, I have the best manners of any. And I speak the best, I know. Sophy talks shockingly broad; she says, "Aw wanted him to coom, boot he would not." Fanny has found that will not do, so she tries to imitate my Aunt Dorothea and Amelia Bracewell, but she goes on the other side of her pattern, and does not sound the u full where she ought to do it, but says, "The basin is fell of shegar." Hatty laughs at them both, and lets her u go where it likes, but she is not so bad as Sophy. I think I shall try and put the notion into my Aunt Kezia's head to have the Bracewells here for Christmas. I know Angus and Flora will be here then, and later. That would make a decent party, if we got Ephraim Hebblethwaite, and Ambrose Catterall too.