ys before we reached Halifax, where I was cheered, and saddened
too, by the sight of well-known English faces. I had just finished
letters to my father, E----, and Lady Dacre, for the _Hibernia_, which
was to touch there the next morning on her way _home_, and was sitting
disconsolate with my head in my hands, in a small cabin on deck, to
which I had been carried up from below as soon as I was well enough to
bear being removed from my own, when Mr. Cunard, the originator of this
Atlantic Steam Mail-packet enterprise, whom I had met in London, came
in, and with many words of kindness and good cheer, carried me up to his
house in Halifax, where I rested for an hour, and where I saw Major
S----, an uncle of my dear B----, and where we talked over English
friends and acquaintances and places, and whence I returned to the ship
for our two days' more misery, with a bunch of exquisite flowers, born
English subjects, which are now withering in my letter-box among my most
precious farewell words of friends.

The children bore the voyage as well as could be expected; sick one half
hour, and stuffing the next; little F---- _pervading_ the ship from stem
to stern, like Ariel, and generally presiding at the officers' mess in
undismayed she-loneliness.

Your friend Captain G---- was her devoted slave and admirer.... I saw
but little of the worthy captain, being only able to come on deck the
last four days of our passage; but he was most kind to us all, and after
romping with the children and walking Miss Hall off her legs, he used to
come and sit down by me, and sing, and hum, and whistle every imaginable
tune that ever lodged between lines and spaces, and some so original
that I think they never were imprisoned within any musical bars
whatever. I gave him at parting the fellow of your squeeze of the hand,
and told him that as yours was on my account, mine was on yours. He left
us at Boston to go on to Niagara.

Our ship was extremely full, and there being only one stewardess on
board, the help she could afford any of us was very little.... While in
Boston I made a pilgrimage to dear Dall's grave: a bitter and a sad few
minutes I spent, lying upon that ground beneath which she lay, and from
which her example seemed to me to rise in all the brightness of its
perfect lovingness and self-denial. The oftener I think of her, the more
admirable her life appears to me. She was undoubtedly gifted by nature
with a temperament of rare health