Near one! well, well! I certainly have had pedigree to my heart’s content. Been hard at work for 3½ hours till my back aches and I am properly tired. Never mind, I have learned a good deal and secured a good deal. It is very kind of Robert to trust me with his valuable pedigrees, so beautifully emblazoned.” Mr. Blake-Humfrey was good enough to consider that he too derived benefit from the lessons. “Your observant eyes,” he writes when she is gone, “have done good service in sundry ways towards the correction of errors, which may atone in some measure for the mischief they are well- calculated to cause in other ways.” On May 28th she visited her Mother’s old home, Honing Hall, and made the acquaintance of an elderly uncle who was something of a character. “He offered lunch, and then took us up to see the rooms. All shutters up, and had to be re-opened and re-shut. In an upstairs sitting-room I unluckily wanted to see a Family Bible, and said, ‘Is that the Family Bible with the names, etc.?’ ‘Yes, it is. You leave it alone—unless you want to see it.’ I persisted I did and he took it down. Then out came Burke’s Gentry and _alia_.... I thought I should have been eaten up the way he roared at me. I asked if he hadn’t a pedigree, and he almost roared again, wanting to know what I could want better than Burke. I might have told him there were no shields, no intermarriages, etc., but I held my peace, he really frightened me. I got him to show me my dear old Mother’s room as a girl, and kissed the bed and furniture. Thought of her as a girl there, her fun and her troubles, her courting-days perhaps and the letters and thought and hopes that room had witnessed. My precious darling Mother!” In July she returned to Brighton, “much better and better-tempered” as she expresses it, for the outing. Richer, too, she was, in her whole outlook on life, and particularly in the knowledge of her girl-cousins, Elinor and Sarah Jex-Blake, and Mary Evans, with all of whom the friendship was to prove a lasting one. A month later, to Sophy’s great joy, Cousin Ellie accompanied the Sussex Square party on a holiday visit to Wales. Primary education at Bettws-y-Coed was at a low ebb in those days, the village school being in the hands of a cobbler whose acquirements were not great, and whose idea of discipline was primitive in the extreme. Caroline and Sophy Jex-Blake became deeply interested in the children and gradually fell into the habit of taking a class in reading, arithmetic, geography, etc. It was an arrangement that gave great satisfaction to all concerned, and one into which Sophy entered with whole-hearted enthusiasm. One is not surprised to gather from the letters of the period that she awakened a feeling deeper than interest in one of the professional men with whom she was brought in contact, but the diary makes no reference to the fact, and she may not even have been aware of it.