'About going on with my education. You ask if I am keeping up my French and German, but there really seems no time. The two hours' practising for Herr Frankenburg is as much as I can possibly get in. I am busy with Nancy all morning, the music takes the best part of the afternoon, then the children come home, and after tea I must see that they learn their lessons and go to bed, and Father likes someone to talk to in the evenings. It is so dull for him if I am buried in a German exercise when he wants to tell me about the farm. I try to attack a few "improving" books when I can manage it, and I have begun to read Carlyle's "French Revolution" to Father in the evenings, but I am sorry to say it generally sends him to sleep. He is so tired with the threshing just now, poor darling! and, as he said one night: "You see, my dear, I have so many troubles of my own at present that the trials of the French peasantry of a hundred years ago seem an affair of quite minor importance."'