8th.—­My life is a nice little life just now, as regular as clockwork.  We walk and we keep school, and our scholars kiss and love us, and we kiss and love them, and we read Lamartine and I worship Leighton, good, wise, holy Leighton, and we discourse about everything together and dispute and argue and argue and dispute, and I’m quite happy, so I am!  As to Lamartine, he’s no great things, as I know of, but I want to keep up my knowledge of French and so we read twenty pages a day.  And as to our discourses, my fidgety, moralising sort of mind wants to compare its doctrines with those of other people, though it’s as stiff as a poker in its own opinions.  You’re a very consistent little girl! you call yourself a child, are afraid to open your mouth before folks, and yet you’re as obstinate and proud as a little man, daring to think for yourself and act accordingly at the risk of being called odd and incomprehensible.  I don’t care, though!  Run on and break your neck if you will.  You’re nothing especial after all.

9th.—­To-night, in unrolling a bundle of work I found a little note therein from mother.  Whew, how I kissed it!  I thought I should fly out of my senses, I was so glad.  But I can’t fly now-a-days, I’m growing so unetherial.  Why, I take up a lot of room in the world and my frocks won’t hold me.  That’s because my heart is so quiet, lying as still as a mouse, after all its tossings about and trying to be happy in the things of this life.  Oh, I am so happy now in the other life!  But as for telling other people so—­as for talking religion—­I don’t see how I can. It doesn’t come natural.  Is it because I am proud?  But I pray to be so holy, so truly a Christian, that my life shall speak and gently persuade all who see me to look for the hidden spring of my perpetual happiness and quietness.  The only question is:  Do I live so?  I’m afraid I make religion seem too grave a thing to my watching maidens down-stairs; but, oh, I’m afraid to rush into their pleasures.

25th.—­ ...  I’ve been “our Lizzy” all my life and have not had to display my own private feelings and opinions before folks, but have sat still and listened and mused and lived within myself, and shut myself up in my corner of the house and speculated on life and the things thereof till I’ve got a set of notions of my own which don’t fit into the notions of anybody I know.  I don’t open myself to anybody on earth; I can not; there is a world of something in me which is not known to those about me and perhaps never will be; but sometimes I think it would be delicious to love a mind like mine in some things, only better, wiser, nobler.  I do not quite understand life.  People don’t live as they were made to live, I’m sure ...  I want soul. I want the gracious, glad spirit that finds the good and the beautiful in everything, joined to the manly, exalted intellect—­rare unions, I am sure,