BY THE AUTHOR OF CHRONICLES OF THE SCHÖNBERG-COTTA FAMILY."

Wednesday, May the First, 1745. OTHER always said that on the day I became sixteen she would give me a book of my own, in which to keep a Diary. I have wished for it ever since I was ten, because Mother herself always keeps a Diary; and when anything went wrong in the house, when Jack was provoking, or Father was passionate with him, or when our maid Betty was more than usually wilful, or our man Roger more than usually stupid, she would retire to her own little light closet over the porch, and come out again with a serenity on her face which seemed to spread over the house like fine weather.

And in that little closet there is no furniture but the old rocking-chair, in which Mother used to rock us children to sleep, and a table covered with a white cloth, with four books on it,-the. Bible, Bishop Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying," Thomas à Kempis on the "Imitation of Christ," and the Diary.

The three printed books I was allowed to read, but (except the Bible) they used in my childish days to seem to me very gloomy and grave, and not at all such as to account for that infectious peacefulness in Mother's face and voice.

in the Diary, which we were never permitted to open, although I had often felt sorely tempted to do so, especially since one morning when it lay open by accident, and I saw Jack's name and Father's on the page. For there were blots there such as used to deface my copy-book on those sorrowful days when the lessons appeared particularly hard, when all the world, singing birds, and bees, and breezes, and even my own fingers, seemed against me, and I could not help crying with vexation,-those blots which mother used to call "Fairy Fainéante's footsteps," (for Mother's grandmother was a Huguenot French lady, driven from France by the cruel revocation of the Edict of Nantes,-and Mother taught us French).

It made me wonder if Mother too had her hard lessons to learn, and I longed to peep and see. Yes, there were certainly tears on Mother's Diary. I wonder if there will be any on mine.

So white and clean the pages are now, and the calf-skin binding so bright and new! like life before me, like the bright world which looks so new around me.

How difficult it is to believe the world is so old, and has lasted so long! This morning when I went up over the cliff behind our house to the little croft in the hollow where the cows are pas

I concluded, therefore, that the magic must lietured, to milk Daisy for Mother's morning cup