'I can sympathize thoroughly with all your worries,' it ran, 'for I, too, was left motherless at sixteen, to manage as best I could. Of course, keep up our family standard of cleanliness and order as much as you possibly can, but you will find it a mistake to be too particular and exacting. Rather, let the children run in sometimes with dirty boots than check their confidence by continual fault-finding. I am sorry that the education must needs be somewhat neglected, but after all the other is more important. There are plenty of "blue" Girton girls in the world who do not seem to me to be of much use to anyone except themselves, while as the "little mother" of your home you are filling a place that is the sphere of every true woman. And because you have no time for reading is not any reason why your thinking powers need rust away. There is so much wisdom to be learnt from even the little ordinary incidents of life if one knows how to appreciate them. People say one is apt to grow narrow with living in the country, but I have generally found the people who do so are those who have no interests outside the round of society pleasures or social gossip, and to my mind they would be narrow anywhere. When you know a little about botany and natural history, all the common things on the farm have something to teach you. The quaint sayings of the villagers are often as full of humour as those Scotch books over which people rave so much, and many of their stories are such interesting survivals of ancient folklore that I have often longed to collect them in writing. While surely, to a thoughtful mind, the constant sight of so much loveliness around tends to have a more ennobling effect than an environment of bricks and mortar and smoky chimneys, whatever the Londoners may say.