had upon that somewhat too frolicsome damsel we are not informed, but madam admits that it made herself ill, and adds that “if Silvy does not reform it is impossible to see what can be done for her, for she will not listen to remonstrance.  Betsey is not strong enough to punish so strapping a wench, and it does not seem right that a man should be set to whip any woman or girl, even a wench, else Jack could do it.”

However, Jack’s own patience having been tried by the refractory Silvy, he seems to have taken the matter into his own hands, for his mistress tells us how she was scandalized, on her return from church, by “finding Jack whipping Silvy,” while that young lady was “screaming vehemently, so that all the people passing by could hear her.”  As Jack had discovered Silvy engaged in the amiable diversion of breaking the legs of the young calves by throwing stones at them, one can have a little charity for his summary action, although, as madam gravely remarks, “he might at least have waited until Monday.”

The calves, by the way, had an unlucky winter of it, and were especially shaky about the legs.  We find that a few weeks later “Jack having neglected to repair the barn floor, as he had been directed, a plank had given way and three of the calves’ legs had been broken by the fall.”  We have felt a deep interest in the fate of these calves, but with all our anxiety have failed to discover whether three calves had all their legs broken, or only three legs in all had been sacrificed to Jack’s culpable neglect.

By this time we begin to think that madam would have been just as well off if she had not kept so many servants, and to wonder what they could have had to do.  Perhaps it was the idle man’s playmate that made the trouble.  But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this illusion.  If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times a week, with operas and theatres to fill in the off nights, they are mightily mistaken.

Of sociability there could have been no lack in this rural neighborhood, for besides a ball or two madam records numbers of tea-drinkings and debating clubs, and meetings of the Clio, a literary club, at which assisted at least two future judges of the supreme courts of the States of their adoption, and several other men and women whose names would attract attention even in our clattering days.  Visiting, too, of the old-fashioned spend-the-day sort had not gone out of date—­was indeed so common that madam one evening enters in her journal—­whether in sorrow or in thankfulness there is nothing to tell us, but at least as a notable fact—­that she had “had no company to-day.”