Dec. 25th. How awfully sentimental my first entries do look!... Daddy says he is sorry I have anything that ‘wants a lock.’ Hm, how very well he understands me and my wants! Never mind; dear old man, he is very loving and kind if not brilliant. Oh, Mother, Mother, what should I do without you?... Just said how earnestly I hoped never to see one dear to me die, that I may die first. ‘Oh, don’t think of self at all, Sophy,’ she said, ‘Just see what good you can do.’ Right. 31st. Writing now in my own dear room, darling Mother, how every article in it speaks of her love! They have gone to a New Year’s Eve prayer meeting at St. Mark’s School,—uncommonly slow, I should think. I do think however ‘good’ I became,—or rather I wonder whether I ever could like such very slow spiritualities. Still there’s Bishop Wilberforce and his ‘scaffolding.’ Don’t cry ‘spirit’ and take away ‘means,’—remove the scaffolding because its work is not accomplished.” Footnote 11: “Dec. 20th, 1859. Strange truth this: How already that hope has changed!” For some time she had been writing a story based on her own school life at Mrs. Teed’s,—a story that was never finished. It is very well written of course, but diffuse, and interesting chiefly for its autobiographical touches. She is intensely loyal to both school and schoolmistress, and one feels on reading her descriptions a fresh sense of regret that it should have been necessary to take her away from an atmosphere that seems in many ways to have suited her so well. One episode is definitely autobiographical, and it is of more than passing interest. The small schoolchildren in the story, playing at “shop,” have helped themselves to a quantity of “jewels” in the shape of scraps of coloured quartz, etc., from a grotto in the garden. The theft being discovered, the heroine is called up first, and, in great fear and trembling, owns to having taken one of the fragments. Questioned as to a second, and fearing to add to her condemnation, she falters, “I don’t know.” Due punishment follows (banishment to bed and enforced reading of the chapter about Eli’s sons), then a public scene in hall and forgiveness. Now comes the point of the episode: