There were expeditions of other kinds too.

“Gibby [1] and I,” she writes towards the end of one October, “up a little after five this morning and up the big hill to see the sun rise.  It was moonlight when we went out, and all so still and indistinct—­for it was a cloudy moon—­that our steps and voices sounded quite odd.  It was mild enough, but so wet with dew that our feet grew very cold.  We waited some time on the top before he rose and had a long talk with the Kaims shepherd.  It was well worth having gone; though there was nothing fine in the sky or clouds compared to what I have constantly seen at sunrise.  But what I thought beautiful was the entire change that his rising made in everything.  All we were looking at suddenly became so bright and cheerful, and a hum of people and noises of animals were heard from the village.”  “I wish people,” she adds impetuously, “would shake off sleep as soon as the blushing morn does peep in at their windows.”

[1] Her brother Gilbert.

The entries in these early diaries show a quality of clear authentic vision, which was afterwards so characteristic of her conversation.  For those who remember their own youthful feelings, even the stiff occasional scraps of poetry she wrote at this time glow with a life not always discernible in the deft writing of more experienced verse-makers.

The household was a brisk, cheerful, active one, and ruled by the spirit of order necessary in a home where many different kinds of things are being done each day by its different inmates.  The children were treated with no particular indulgence, and the elder ones were taught to be responsible not only for their own actions, but for the good behaviour, and, in a certain measure, for the education of the younger ones.  As a girl she writes down in her diary many hopes and fears about her younger brothers and sisters, which resemble those afterwards awakened in her by the care of her own children.  A big family in a great house, with all the different relations and contacts such a life implies, is in itself an education, and Lady Fanny seems to have profited by all that such experiences can give.  If she came from such a home anticipating from everybody more loyalty and consistency of feeling than is common in human nature, and crediting everybody with it, that is in itself a kind of generous severity of expectation which, though it may be sometimes the cause of mistakes, helps also to create in others the qualities it looks to find.

The children had plenty of outlets for their high spirits.  There are some slight records left of the opening of a “Theatre Royal, Minto,” and of a glorious evening ending in an “excellent country bumpkin,” with bed at two in the morning; of reels and dances, too, and many hours laconically summed up as “famous fun” in the diary.  Then there were such September days as this: