Friday.—­I drove papa to Manchester, and as usual, this exploit brought on a thunder shower, with a much needed deluge of rain.  I had a hard time getting home, and got wet to the skin.  I had not only to drive, but keep a roll of matting from slipping out, hold up the boot and the umbrella, and keep stopping to get my hat out of my eyes, which kept knocking over them.  Then Coco goes like the wind this summer.  Fortunately I had my waterproof with me and got home safely.  The worst of it is that, in my bewilderment, I refused to let a woman get in who was walking to South Dorset.  I shall die of remorse..  Well, well, how it is raining, to be sure.

Monday.—­I hear that papa sent a dispatch to somebody to know how I got here from Manchester.  I do not wonder he is worried.  I am such a poor driver, and it rained so dreadfully.  M. follows me round like a little dog; if I go down cellar she goes down; if I pick a strawberry she picks one; if I stop picking she stops.  She is the sweetest lamb that ever was, and I am the Mary that’s got her.  I don’t believe anybody else in the world loves me so well, unless it possibly is papa, and he doesn’t follow me down cellar, and goes off and picks strawberries all by himself, and that on Sunday, too, when I had forbidden berrypicking!  We are rioting in strawberries, just as we did last summer.  We live a good deal at sixes and sevens, but nobody cares.  This afternoon I have been arranging a basket for the hall table, with mosses, ferns, shells and white coral; ever so pretty.

Wednesday.—­It is a splendid day and I expect papa.  The children have not said a word about their food, though partly owing to no butcher and partly to the heat, I have had for two days next to nothing; picked fish one day and fish picked the next.  We regarded to-day’s dinner as a most sumptuous one, and I am sure Victoria’s won’t taste so good to her.  Letters keep pouring in, urging papa to accept the Professorship at Chicago, and declaring the vote of the Assembly to be the voice of God.  Of course, if he must accept, we should have to give up our dear little home here.  But to me his leaving the ministry would be the worst thing about it.  After dinner the boys carried me off bodily to see strawberries and other plants; then they made me go to the mill, and by that time I had no hair-pins on my head, to say nothing of hair.  The boys are working away like all possessed.  A little bird, probably one of those hatched here, has just come and perched himself on the piazza, railing in front of me, and is making me an address which, unfortunately, I do not understand....  You have inherited from me a want of reverence for relics and the like.  I wouldn’t go as far as our barn to see the fig-leaves Adam and Eve wore, or all the hair of all the apostles; and when people are not born hero-worshippers, they can’t even worship themselves as heroes.  Fancy Dr. Schaff sending me back the MS. of a hymn I gave him, from a London printing-office!  What could I do with it? cover jelly with it?  He sent me a beautiful copy of his book, “Christ in Song.”