anecdotes about father. Eddy has got big
enough to walk in the street. He looks like a little picture, with his
great forehead and bright eyes. He is in every way as large as most
children are at two years. His supreme delight is to tease A. by making
believe strike her or in some other real boy's hateful way. She and he
play together on the grass-plat, and I feel quite matronly as I sit
watching them with their balls and wheel-barrows and whatnots. This
little scamp has, I fear, broken my constitution to pieces. It makes me
crawl all over when I think of you three fagging all day at such dull
and unprofitable labor. But I am sure Providence will do what is really
best for you all. We think and talk of and pray for you every day and
more than once a day, and, in all my ill-health and sufferings, the
remembrance of you is pleasant and in great measure refreshing. I
depend more upon hearing from you all than I can describe. What an
unconquerable thing family affection is!

She thus writes, May 30th, to her old Portland friend, Miss Lord:

I have written very few letters and not a line of anything else the
past winter, owing to the confusion my mind is in most of the time from
distress in my head. Three days out of every seven I am as sick as I
well can be--the rest of the time languid, feeble, and exhausted by
frequent faint turns, so that I can't do the smallest thing in my
family. I hardly know what it is so much as to put a clean apron on to
one of my children. To me this is a constant pain and weariness; for
our expense in the way of servants is greater than we can afford and
everything is going to destruction under my face and eyes, while I dare
not lift a finger to remedy it. I live in constant alternations of hope
and despondency about my health. Whenever I feel a little better, as I
do to-day, I am sanguine and cheerful, but the next ill-turn depresses
me exceedingly. I don't think there is any special danger of my dying,
but there is a good deal of my getting run down beyond the power of
recovery, and of dragging out that useless existence of which I have a
perfect horror. But I would not have you think I am not happy; for I can
truly say that I _am_, most of the time, as happy as I believe one can
be in this world. All my trials and sufferings shut me up to the one
great Source of peace, and I know there has been need of every one of
them.

I have not yet made my plans for the summer. Our doctor urges me to g