Anna says if she does marry Eugene Stone and he forgets, after two or three years to be as polite to her as he is now she shall look up at him with her sweetest smile and say, "Miss Anna, won't you have a little more sugar in your tea?" When I went to school this morning Juliet Ripley asked, "Where do you think Anna Richards is now? Up in a cherry tree in Dr. Cheney's garden." Anna loves cherries. We could see her from the chapel window.
_June_ 7.--Alice Jewett took Anna all through their new house to-day which is being built and then they went over to Mr. Noah T. Clarke's partly finished house and went all through that. A dog came out of Cat Alley and barked at them and scared Anna awfully. She said she almost had a conniption fit but Emma kept hold of her. She is so afraid of thunder and lightning and dogs.
Old Friend Burling brought Grandfather a specimen of his handwriting to-day to keep. It is beautifully written, like copper plate. This is the verse he wrote and Grandfather gave it to me to paste in my book of extracts:
Could we with ink the ocean fill, Was the whole earth of parchment made, Was every single stick a quill, And every man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could that scroll contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky.
Transcribed by William S. Burling, Canandaigua, 1859, in the 83rd year of his age.
_Sunday, December_ 8, 1859.--Mr. E. M. Morse is our Sunday School teacher now and the Sunday School room is so crowded that we go up into the church for our class recitation. Abbie Clark, Fannie Gaylord and myself are the only scholars, and he calls us the three Christian Graces, faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. I am the tallest, so he says I am charity. We recite in Mr. Gibson's pew, because it is farthest away and we do not disturb the other classes. He gave us some excellent advice to-day as to what was right and said if we ever had any doubts about anything we should never do it and should always be perfectly sure we are in the right before we act. He gave us two weeks ago a poem to learn by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is an apostrophe to God and very hard to learn. It is blank verse and has 85 lines in it. I have it committed at last and we are to recite it in concert. The last two lines are, "Tell thou the silent sky and tell the stars and tell yon rising sun, Earth with its thousand voices praises God." Mr. Morse delivered a lecture in Bemis Hall last Thursday night. The subject was, "You and I." It was splendid and he lent me the manuscript afterwards to read. Dick Valentine lectured in the hall the other night too. His subject was "Prejudice." There was some difference in the lectures and the lecturers. The latter was more highly colored.