grass; and unable to resist the temptation, bonnetless as I was, I set off at the top of my speed, running along the terrace, past the grotto, and down a path where the syringa pelted me with showers of mock-orange blossoms, till I came under some magnificent old cedars, through whose black, broad-spread wings the morning sun shone, drawing their great shadows on the sweet-smelling earth beneath them, strewed with their russet-colored shedding.  I thought it looked and smelt like a Russia-leather carpet.  Then I came to the brink of the water, to a little deserted fishing pavilion surrounded by a wilderness of bloom that was once a garden, and then I ran home to breakfast.  After breakfast I went over the very same ground with Lady Francis, extremely demure, with my bonnet on my head and a parasol in my hand, and the utmost propriety of decorous demeanor, and said never a word of my mad morning’s explorings.  A girl’s run and a young lady’s walk are very different things, and I hold both pleasant in their way.  The carriage was ordered to take my mother to Addlestone to see poor old Mrs. Whitelock, and during her absence Lady Francis and I repaired to her own private sitting-room, and we entertained each other with extracts from our respective journals.  I was struck with the high esteem she expressed for Lord Carlisle; in one place in her journal she said she wished she could hope her boys would grow up as excellent men as he is, and this in spite of her party politics, for she is a Tory and he a Whig, and she is really a partisan politician.

In the afternoon, after a charming meandering ride, we determined to go to Monks Grove, the place Lady Charlotte Greville has taken on St. Anne’s Hill....  In the evening we had terrifical ghost stories, which held, us fascinated till one o’clock in the morning.

“The stones done, to bed they creep,
By whispering winds soon lull’d asleep.”

Sunday, June 12th.—­ ...  It’s nearly five years since I said my
prayers in that dear old little Weybridge church....

On our return, as the horses are never used on Sunday, we went down to the water and got into the boat.  The day was lovely, and as we glided along the bright water my mother and Lady Francis and I murmured, half voice, all sorts of musical memories, which made a nice accompaniment to Lord Francis’s occasional oar-dip that just kept the boat in motion.  When we landed, my mother returned to the house, and the rest of us set off for a long delightful stroll to the farm, where I saw a monstrous and most beautiful dog whom I should like to have hugged, but that he looked so grave and wise it seemed like a liberty.  We walked on through a part of the park called America, because of the magnificent rhododendrons and azaleas and the general wildness of the whole.  The mass was so deep one’s feet sank into it; the sun, setting, threw low, slanting rays along the earth and among the old tree trunks.