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SIX TO SIXTEEN.

INTRODUCTION.

Eleanor and I are subject to _fads_. Indeed, it is a family failing. (By
the family I mean our household, for Eleanor and I are not, even
distantly, related.) Life would be comparatively dull, up away here on
the moors, without them. Our fads and the boys' fads are sometimes the
same, but oftener distinct. Our present one we would not so much as tell
them of on any account; because they would laugh at us. It is this. We
purpose this winter to write the stories of our own lives down to the
present date.

It seems an egotistical and perhaps silly thing to record the
trivialities of our everyday lives, even for fun, and just to please
ourselves. I said so to Eleanor, but she said, "Supposing Mr. Pepys had
thought so about his everyday life, how much instruction and amusement
would have been lost to the readers of his Diary." To which I replied,
that as Mr. Pepys lived in stirring times, and amongst notable people,
_his_ daily life was like a leaf out of English history, and his case
quite different to the case of obscure persons living simply and
monotonously on the Yorkshire moors. On which Eleanor observed that the
simple and truthful history of a single mind from childhood would be as
valuable, if it could be got, as the whole of Mr. Pepys' Diary from the
first volume to the last. And when Eleanor makes a general observation
of this kind in her conclusive tone, I very seldom dispute it; for, to
begin with, she is generally right, and then she is so much more clever
than I.

One result of the confessed superiority of her opinion to mine is that I
give way to it sometimes even when I am not quite convinced, but only
helped by a little weak-minded reason of my own in the background. I
gave way in this instance, not altogether to her argument (for I am sure
_my_ biography will not be the history of a mind, but only a record of
small facts important to no one but myself), but chiefly because I think
that as one grows up one enjoys recalling the things that happened when
one was little. And one forgets them so soon! I envy Eleanor for having
kept her childish diaries. I used to write diaries too, but, when I was
fourteen years old, I got so much ashamed of them (it made me quite hot
to read my small moral reflections, and the pompous account of my
quarrels with Matilda, my sentimental admiration for the handsome
ban