* * * * *

I hope I wasn’t hard on Sam.  I couldn’t help telling him if he’d gone up to the schools, as Larkin Prince did, and he might have done, he could have made himself fit for an engineer or a chemical agent.  Well, it took him kind of surprised, and I agreed to go round this evening, when father is at home, and talk to father and mother about Sam’s going to some of them schools.  At least he might try; and, anyhow, it would get him out of the kind of company he’s taken a fancy to.

I must say I didn’t think of how he’d feel about Clara Wylie; but, of course, her father would never have given Sam any encouragement more than Larkin.  And as for Clara Wylie—­well, I saw her look at Larkin that night.

* * * * *

I don’t know but I made a mistake in sending so many of his woollen socks to Artemas by Larkin Prince.  Perhaps I had better have sent more of the cotton ones.  Larkin said he would tell him we were all well, and how he found us.  Lavinia had gone up to bed, and was hollering to me to come up to her, and Cyrus slung Silas’s cap into the window, and it most hit Larkin; Silas came in after it through the window, and the rest of the boys were pounding on the barn door, where they were having a militia meeting, or some kind of a parade, with half the boys in town.  So Artemas will know things goes on about as usual.

* * * * *

An excellent sermon from Mr. Jenkins today.  I can’t seem to think what it was about, to put it down; but we are all of us more and more pleased with him as a minister.  You can’t expect all things of any man; and if a minister preaches a good sermon twice a Sunday and perhaps at evening meeting, and goes around among the people as much as Mr. Jenkins, and holds meetings through the week, and Bible class every Friday evening, and sits by the bedside of the sick and the dying, and gives a hand in his own farming or a neighbor’s, and stands on the committee for the schools, I don’t know as you can expect much more of him.

Mrs. Carruthers says there’s a talk of the Peebles moving up to the city for good and all.  I should think they might as well go as careening back and forth, spring and fall; though she says they will still go down to the seashore or up to the mountains, summers.  When I had a home, I will say, I liked to stay in it.

There, now!  I do believe that I have not mentioned in my diary that our house is burned down, and much as ever we all got out alive, coming in the night so.  I suppose I ought to have put it in as being one of the principal events; but somehow I have been so unsettled since the fire, I haven’t seemed to think to write it down.  And, of course, Artemas would see from the depot, the minute he arrived, that the house wasn’t there, and he wouldn’t need to wait and read about it in my diary; and I have been pretty busy getting set to rights again.  Everything being burnt, there ’s all the summer clothes to be made over again, except a few things I brought off in a bundle along with the diary.  Still, it might have been better than writing about my neighbors, as I did about the Peebles.