_Thursday_.--We gave the ambrotype to Miss Pierce and she liked it very much and so does her mother and Fannie. Her mother is lame and cannot go anywhere so we often go to see her and she is always glad to see us and so pleasant.
_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 corolla 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 barège 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."