FANNY.

CRANFORD HOUSE, January 8th, 1843.
DEAREST HAL,

I am spending two days at Cranford--you know, I believe, where I mean,
old Lady Berkeley's place.... I came to get the refreshment of the
country; old Lady Berkeley is very kind to me, and I like her daughters,
Lady Mary particularly. I came down yesterday (Saturday), and shall
return early to-morrow, for on Wednesday the children are to have a
party of their little friends, and I am making a Christmas-tree for them
(rather out of date), and expect to be exceedingly busy both to-morrow
and Tuesday in preparing for their amusement.

My father does not suffer nearly as much pain as he did a short time
ago, but his strength appears to me to be gradually diminishing....

[Our return to America being once more indefinitely postponed, we
now took a house in Upper Grosvenor Street, close to Hyde Park, to
which we removed from the Clarendon, my sister residing very near
us, in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square.]

26, UPPER GROSVENOR STREET, Wednesday, March 1st, 1843.

Thank you, my dear T----, for your attention to our interests and
affairs.... It seems to me that to have to accept the conviction of the
unworthiness of those we love must be even worse than to lay our dearest
in the earth, for we may believe that they have risen into the bosom of
God. However, each human being's burden is the one whose weight must
seem the heaviest to himself, and He alone who lays them on proportions
them to our strength and enables us to walk upright beneath them....

[Extract from a letter from Miss Sedgwick.]

NEW YORK, March 3rd, 1843.

The great topic with us just now is the trial of Mackenzie, of whom, as
the chief actor in the tragedy of the "Somers," you must have heard.
Some of your journals cry out upon him, but, as we think, only the
organs of that hostile inhuman spirit that bad minds try to keep alive
on both sides of the water. His life has been marked with courage and
humanity; all enlightened and unperverted, I may say all sane opinion
with us, is in his favor. After the most honorable opinion from the
Court of Inquiry, he is now under trial by court-martial, demanded by
his friends to save him from a civil suit. S----, the father of the Ohio
mutineer, is a man of distinguished talent, of education, and head of
the War Depa