May 9.–Miss Lizzie Bull came for me to go botanising with her this morning and we were gone from 9 till 12, and went clear up to the orphan asylum. I am afraid I am not a born botanist, for all the time she was analysing the flowers and telling me about the corona and the corrolla and the calyx and the stamens and petals and pistils, I was thinking what beautiful hands she had and how dainty they looked, pulling the blossoms all to pieces. I am afraid I am commonplace, like the man we read of in English Literature, who said “a primrose by the river brim, a yellow primrose, was to him, and it was nothing more.”
Mr William Wood came to call this afternoon and gave us some morning-glory seeds to sow and told us to write down in our journals that he did so. So here it is. What a funny old man he is. Anna and Emma Wheeler went to Hiram Tousley’s funeral to-day. She has just written in her journal that Hiram’s corpse was very perfect of him and that Fannie looked very pretty in black. She also added that after the funeral Grandfather took Aunt Ann and Lucilla out to ride to Mr Howe’s and just as they got there it sprinkled. She says she don’t know “weather” they got wet or not. She went to a picnic at Sucker Brook yesterday afternoon, and this is the way she described it in her journal. “Miss Hurlburt told us all to wear rubbers and shawls and bring some cake and we would have a picnic. We had a very warm time. It was very warm indeed and I was most roasted and we were all very thirsty indeed. We had in all the party about 40 of us. It was very pleasant and I enjoyed myself exceedingly. We had boiled eggs, pickles, Dutch cheese and sage cheese and loaf cake and raisin cake, pound cake, dried beef and capers, jam and tea cakes and gingerbread, and we tried to catch some fish but we couldn’t, and in all we had a very nice time. I forgot to say that I picked some flowers for my teacher. I went to bed tired out and worn out.”
Her next entry was the following day when she and the other scholars dressed up to “speak pieces.” She says, “After dinner I went and put on my rope petticoat and lace one over it and my barege de laine dress and all my rings and white bask and breastpin and worked handkerchief and spoke my piece. It was, ‘When I look up to yonder sky.’ It is very pretty indeed and most all the girls said I looked nice and said it nice. They were all dressed up, too.”
Thursday.–I asked Grandfather why we do not have gas in the house like almost every one else and he said because it was bad for the eyes and he liked candles and sperm oil better. We have the funniest little sperm oil lamp with a shade on to read by evenings and the fire on the hearth gives Grandfather and Grandmother all the light they want, for she knits in her corner and we read aloud to them if they want us to. I think if Grandfather is proud of anything besides being a Bostonian, it is that everything in the house is forty years old. The shovel and tongs and andirons and fender and the haircloth sofa and the haircloth rocking chair and the flag bottomed chairs painted dark green and the two old arm-chairs which belong to them and no one else ever think of touching. There is a wooden partition between the dining-room and parlor and they say it can slide right up out of sight on pulleys, so that it would be all one room. We have often said that we wished we could see it go up but they say it has never been up since the day our mother was married and as she is dead I suppose it would make them feel bad, so we probably will always have it down. There are no curtains or even shades at the windows, because Grandfather says, “light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is to behold the sun.” The piano is in the parlor and it is the same one that our mother had when she was a little girl but we like it all the better for that. There are four large oil paintings on the parlor wall, De Witt Clinton, Rev. Mr Dwight, Uncle Henry Channing Beals and Aunt Lucilla Bates, and no matter where we sit in the room they are watching and their eyes seem to move whenever we do. There is quite a handsome lamp on a mahogany centre table, but I never saw it lighted. We have four sperm candles in four silver candlesticks and when we have company we light them. Johnnie Thompson, son of the minister, Rev. M. L. R. P., has come to the academy to school and he is very full of fun and got acquainted with all the girls very quick. He told us this afternoon to have “the other candle lit” for he was coming down to see us this evening. Will Schley heard him say it and he said he was coming too. His mother says she always knows when he has been at our house, because she finds sperm on his clothes and has to take brown paper and a hot flatiron to get it out, but still I do not think that Mrs Schley cares, for she is a very nice lady and she and I are great friends. I presume she would just as soon he would spend part of his time with us as to be with Horace Finley all the time. Those boys are just like twins. We never see one without being sure that the other is not far away.
Later.–The boys came and we had a very pleasant evening but when the 9 o’clock bell rang we heard Grandfather winding up the clock and scraping up the ashes on the hearth to cover the fire so it would last till morning and we all understood the signal and they bade us good-night. “We won’t go home till morning” is a song that will never be sung in this house.