The contrast of the next paragraph in the diary is irresistible: “A mouse caught at last. Odd, how it annoys me! ‘Shall I drown it, ma’am?’ ‘Oh, let it eat its cheese first!’ How Octa’d laugh! Faugh!— poor little thing, how it struggled for its life,—and how my heart beat! It was some courage to resolve it shouldn’t suffer longer than need be.” About her friends she has much to say as usual. On March 31st she writes to Cousin Ellie: “Now for friends. I think I really may put that word to Dora Burn Murdoch and Margaret Orr, short as the time seems in days since I have known them; but then days sometimes go for weeks and they have both been _so_ kind to me. ‘I was a stranger and they took me in.’ [Dora’s] charity for others is something quite beautiful, her unconsciousness of other people’s inferiority to her,—her width of thought, and power of understanding those differing most widely from herself—most admirable. You never hear her by any chance say a harsh thing, a spiteful thing or a narrow thing,—neither do you ever hear a weak one.” She speaks many times in her diary of the rest and refreshment derived from visits to Mrs. Burn Murdoch. But she was working too hard, and Mrs. Jex-Blake’s letters at this time take on an even deeper note than usual of love, appreciation and solicitude. Varieties of note-paper were not great in those days, so S. J.-B. had possessed herself of a large quantity of common brown envelopes (similar to those used for the delivery of telegrams) in order that her Mother might see at a glance— without putting on her spectacles!—whether the postman had brought the all-important thing. Many are Mrs. Jex-Blake’s references to “the precious brown envelope,” “the dear brown letters”; and well might she prize them. Indeed one does not know which to admire more,—the painstaking labour with which S. J.-B., at the end of a hard day’s work, strove to keep her Mother informed of all she was thinking and doing and trying to do—or the painstaking labour with which her Mother strove to understand and sympathize. She writes at great length about _Jane Eyre_, about the higher education of women, and she enters into her daughter’s religious arguments with a largeness of soul that is simply uplifting: “I expect,” she says, “I quoted in commas the very words _you_ wrote about the Atonement. The rest was, of course, my able and learned commentary. I _think_ I did take your words in your sense, though I couldn’t help their _expanding_—you will perhaps say, narrowing,—in my view. He will guide us both into all truth.” The following extracts give some idea how these beautiful letters go on: