eagerness--intensely interested in the joyousness and beauty of the sight, but in her heart always secretly thankful if the fox escaped. Fox-hunting on Minto Crags must indeed have been a picturesque sight, and there was a special rock overhanging a precipice upon which she loved to sit and watch the wild chase, men and horses appearing and disappearing with flashing rapidity among the woods and ravines beneath. The pleasures of an open-air life meant so much to her that, in so far as it was possible for one with her temperament to pine at all, she was often homesick in the town, longing for the peace and freedom of the country.

Page 4.

There were expeditions of other kinds too.

"Gibby ¹ and I," she writes towards the end of one October, "up a little after five this morning and up the big hill to see the sun rise. It was moonlight when we went out, and all so still and indistinct--for it was a cloudy moon--that our steps and voices sounded quite odd. It was mild enough, but so wet with dew that our feet grew very cold. We waited some time on the top before he rose and had a long talk with the Kaims shepherd. It was well worth having gone; though there was nothing fine in the sky or clouds compared to what I have constantly seen at sunrise. But what I thought beautiful was the entire change that his rising made in everything. All we were looking at suddenly became so bright and cheerful, and a hum of people and noises of animals were heard from the village." "I wish people," she adds impetuously, "would shake off sleep as soon as the blushing morn does peep in at their windows."

The entries in these early diaries show a quality of clear authentic vision, which was afterwards so characteristic of her conversation. For those who remember their own youthful feelings, even the stiff occasional scraps of poetry she wrote at this time glow with a life not always discernible in the deft writing of more experienced verse-makers.

The household was a brisk, cheerful, active one, and ruled by the spirit of order necessary in a home where many different kinds of things are being done each day by its different inmates. The children were treated with no particular indulgence, and the elder ones were taught to be responsible not only for their own actions, but for the good behaviour, and, in a certain measure, for the education of the younger ones. As a girl she writes down in her diary many hopes and fears about her younger brothers and sisters, which resemble those afterwards awakened in her by the care of her own children. A big family in a great house, with all the different relations and contacts such a life implies, is in itself an education, and Lady Fanny seems to have profited by all that such experiences can give. If she came from such a home anticipating from everybody more loyalty and consistency of feeling than is common in human nature, and crediting everybody with it, that is in itself a kind of generous severity of expectation which, though it may be sometimes the cause of mistakes, helps also to create in others the qualities it looks to find.

Page 5.

The children had plenty of outlets for their high spirits. There are some slight records left of the opening of a "Theatre Royal, Minto," and of a glorious evening ending in an "excellent country bumpkin," with bed at two in the morning; of reels and dances, too, and many hours laconically summed up as "famous fun" in the diary. Then there were such September days as this:

"Bob'm ² and I went in the phaeton to meet the boys. They were very successful--about twelve brace. The heather was in full blow, and in wet parts the ground white with parnassia. I never felt such an air--it made me feel quite wild. The sunset behind the far hills and reflected in the lonely little shaw loch most beautiful. When we began our walk there was a fine soft wind that felt as if it would lift one up to the clouds, but before we got back to the little house it had quite fallen, and all was as still as in a desert, except now and then the wild cry of the grouse and black-cock. Bob'm mad with spirits, and talked nonsense all the way home. Not too dark to see the beautiful outline of the country all the way."

Such tired, happy home-comings stay in the memory; drives back at the end of long days, when scraps of talk and laughter and the pleasure of being together mingle so kindly with the solemnity of the darkening country; drives which end in a sudden blaze of welcome, in fire-light and candles, tea and a hubbub of talk, when everything, though familiar, seems to confess to a new happiness.

Here is another entry a few days later:

Page 6.

"Beautiful day, but a very high, warm real Minto wind. We wandered out very late and sat under the lime, playing at being at sea, feeling the stem rock above us as we lent against it and hearing the roaring of the waves in the trees. No summer's day can be better than such a day and evening as this--there was a cloudy moon, too, above the branches. I wish I could express, but I never can, the sort of feeling I have at times--now more than I ever had before--which would sound like affectation if one talked of it. A fine day, or beautiful country, or very often nothing but the sky or earth or the singing of a bird gives it. One feels too much love and gratitude and admiration, and something swells my heart so that I do not know how to look or listen enough."

There was another kind of romance, too, in her young life, destined in future to be at times a source of pain and anxiety, though also of keen gratification and permanent pride. What can equal the romance of politics when we are quite young, when "politics" mean nothing but "serving one's country" and have no other associations but that one, when politicians seem necessarily great men? The love-dreams of adolescence have often been celebrated; but among young creatures whose lives give plenty of play to their affections in a spontaneous way, such dreams seldom vie in intensity with the mysterious call of religion or with the emotion of patriotism. It stands for an emotion which seems as large as the love of mankind, and its service calls for enthusiasm and self-devotion. The Mintos were in the thick of politics and the times were stirring times. "Throughout the last two centuries of our history," says Sir George Trevelyan in his Life of Macaulay, "there never was a period when a man, conscious of power, impatient of public wrongs, and still young enough to love a fight for its own sake, could have entered Parliament with a fairer prospect of leading a life worth living and doing work that would requite the pains, than at the commencement of the year 1830." Her father was not only the most genial and kindest of fathers, but he was to her something of a hero too. His political career had not begun during these days at Minto; still he was in the counsel of the leaders of the day--Lord Grey, Lord John Russell, Lords Melbourne and Althorp--great names indeed to her. And the new Cabinet was soon to appoint him Minister at Berlin.

Page 7.

The country was under the personal rule of the Duke of Wellington, who had sorted out from his Cabinet any who were tainted with sympathy for reform; but, as the election of July which resulted in his resignation showed, the country, however one-sided its representation might have been in the House of Commons, had been long in a state of political ferment. This state of affairs, the gradual breaking up of the Tory party