My poor journal! And yet I shall continue writing it, and perhaps even more frankly now it will be read only by me; for while I write I seem to be talking to my dearest mother, and to be a little less solitary.... II _December_ 21, 1772. Winter has come on: a melancholy, wet and stormy winter, without the glitter of snow and ice; and with the sea moaning or roaring by turns. I think with longing (though I hope poor Eustace does not guess how near I sometimes am to crying for homesickness) of our sledging parties with the dear cheerful neighbours at Grandfey; of the skating on the ponds, and the long walks on the crisp frozen snow, when Eustace and I would snowball or make long slides, laughing like children. At St. Salvat's there are no neighbours; or if there are (but the nearest large house is ten miles off, and belongs to a noble lord who never leaves London) they do not show themselves. I do not even know what there is or is not in the country that lies inland; in fact, since our coming, I have never left the grounds and park of St. Salvat's, nor gone beyond the old fortified walls which encircle them. My very curiosity has gradually faded. I have never pressed Hubert for the saddle horse and the equipage (the coach-house contains only broken-down coaches of the days of King George I.) which he promised rather vaguely to procure for me on our first coming; I have no wish to pass beyond that drawbridge; like a caged bird, I have grown accustomed to my prison. Since the bad weather I have even ceased my rambles in the shrubberies and on the grass-grown terraces: the path to the sea has been slippery with mud; besides I hate that melancholy winter sea, always threatening or complaining. I stay within doors for days together, without pleasure or profit, reading old plays and novels which I throw aside, or putting a few stitches into useless tambour work; I who could formerly not live a day within doors, nor do whatever I set to do without childish strenuousness! These two or three days past I have been trying to find diversion in reading the history of these parts, where the Brandlings--kings of this part of Wales in the time of King Arthur, crusaders later, and great barons fighting at Crecy and at Agincourt--once played so great a part, and now they have dwindled into common smugglers, for 'tis my growing persuasion that such is the real trade hidden under the name of pilchard fishing--defrauders of the King's Exchequer, and who knows? for all Hubert's rank as magistrate, no better than thieves and outlawed ruffians.