ustry, the patched
bed-quilts? Our diarist, rich as her closets were in blankets and linen,
left but few bed-quilts to vex the eyes of her descendants, yet we read
that "Betsey and I quilted a bed-quilt this afternoon"--their fingers
were surely nimble--"and in the evening"--happy change of
employment!--"Betsey finished reading aloud from Blair's
_Lectures._ To-morrow evening we shall begin the _Spectator_.
My husband has sent us by private hand Mr. A. Pope's translation of the
_Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, but it has not yet arrived. Strange
that a private hand should be slower than the post!"

And indeed the slowness of the post had been a source of frequent
disquietude to our madam during this lonely winter, for very lonely it
was to the waiting wife and mother, notwithstanding all her occupations.
"'Life's employments are life's enjoyments,'" she sadly writes on the
night before Christmas, "and surely I have not a few of them; but with
my beloved husband and son far from me I cannot half enjoy my life. I
have given the servants their presents to-night" (though living in
Puritan Connecticut, our madam was of Hollandish stock, and did not
ignore the Christmas festival), "and paid them eighteen pence apiece not
to wish me a Merry Christmas to-morrow, for little merriment indeed
should there be for me."

Yet she was a cheerful soul, this stately madam who sadly gazes into the
fire on the Christmas Eve of seventy years ago--a cheerful, loving soul,
and a kindly (notwithstanding her chastisement of the delinquent Silvy);
and after all the winter wore not unhappily away.

With the opening spring husband and son returned to gladden her heart,
and we close the little diary with a smile at once of sympathy and of
amusement as we read that while madam had intended to meet her loved
ones with the family coach on their landing from the sloop at
Poughkeepsie, thirty miles from her home, she was "so detained by reason
of the depth and vileness of the mud that it was full fifteen miles this
side the river" (Hudson) "that our coach fell in with a hired carriage
coming this way. The road was so bad that we had difficulty in passing,
and it was not until we were almost by that my dear husband noticed his
own coach. There was some trouble in getting from the one carriage to
the other, but when all were safely in the coach there was much
rejoicing, you may be sure."

ETHEL C. GALE.

A MARCH V