CHAPTER IV.
A COUNTRY HOME.
The delight expressed in her diary upon her removal to Plashet, found vent in efforts to beautify the grounds. The garden-nooks and plantations were filled with wild flowers, gathered by herself and children in seasons of relaxation, and transferred from the coppices, hedge-rows, and meadows, to the grounds, which appeared to her to be only second in beauty to Earlham. Mrs. Fry was possessed of a keen eye for Nature's beauties. Quick to perceive and eager to relish the delights of the fair world around, she took pleasure in them, finding relaxation from the many duties which clustered about her in the spot of earth on which her lot was cast. Her journal tells of trials and burdens, and sometimes there peeps out a sentence of regret that the ideal which she had formed of serving God, in the lost years of youth, had been absorbed in "the duties of a careworn wife and mother." Yet what she fancied she had lost in this waiting-time had been gained, after all, in preparation. This quiet domestic life was not what she had looked forward to when in the first flush of youthful zeal. Still, she was thereby trained to deal with the young
