ely to
be deterred from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long
drive at the end. Not the least of my many blessings is that we have
only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at
least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping in
at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with your
life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your dreams
to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certainty that either
you or the dropper-in will say something that would have been better
left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and mischief-making. A
woman's tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the
world to keep in order, and things slip off it with a facility nothing
short of appalling at the very moment when it ought to be most quiet.
In such cases the only safe course is to talk steadily about cooks and
children, and to pray that the visit may not be too prolonged, for if it
is you are lost. Cooks I have found to be the best of all subjects--the
most phlegmatic flush into life at the mere word, and the joys and
sufferings connected with them are experiences common to us all.

Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with
a whole troop of flaxenhaired little children to keep them occupied,
besides the business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged
on lines of the most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year,
and she returns the call a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in the
summer, and we ask them to dinner in the winter. By strictly keeping
to this, we avoid all danger of that closer friendship which is only
another name for frequent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a German
country lady should be, and is not only a pretty woman but an energetic
and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least, effective.
She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the
butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things
get done while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are
well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on
the place, to rate the "mamsells," as the head women are called, to poke
into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid
eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless dairymaid's ears. We are
allowed by law to administer "slight corporal punishment" to our