before women are justly dealt with by the
social or civil codes of Christian communities to which they belong,
longer still before they are righteously dealt with by the individuals
to whom they belong; but it will not be _for ever_. With the world's
progress that reform will come, too; though I believe it will be the
very last before the millennium.

I hope this poor unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy,
and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers
depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian
society--especially its women--towards a woman who, after being seduced
by a man, murdered him.

Did I never tell you of that unhappy creature in New York, who was in
the same situation, except that the villain she stabbed did not die, who
was tried and acquitted, and who found a shelter in Charles Sedgwick's
house, and who, when the despairing devil of all her former miseries
took possession of her, used to be thrown into paroxysms of insane
anguish, during which Elizabeth [Mrs. Charles Sedgwick] used to sit by
her and watch her, and comfort her and sing to her, till she fell
exhausted with misery into sleep? That poor woman used to remind me of
my children's nurse....

I receive frequent complaints, not from you only, that I do not write
sufficiently in detail about myself. It is on that account that I am
always so glad to be _asked questions_, because they remind me of what
my friends specially desire to know about me when otherwise I should be
apt to write to them about what interested me, rather than what I was
doing or saying, and the things and people that surround me, which I do
not always find interesting.

You do just the same; your letters are very often indeed discussions
upon matters of abstract speculation rather than tidings of
yourself,--your doing, being, or suffering,--and I have not objected to
this in you, though it has given me a deal of trouble in answering you,
because I like people to go their own way in everything; moreover,
unless I am reminded by questions of what _is happening to me_, it
interests me so little that I should probably forget to mention it....

If my faith, dearest Hal, depended upon my knowledge of the means by
which the results in which I have faith will be achieved, I should have
some cause for despondency. Do you suppose I imagine that the sudden
violence of a national convulsion will make people Christians who are
not so?... My a