is one might bring forth, for I remember your saying it
would probably be the last visit to you, and that you wanted to make it
as pleasant as possible. And pleasant I do not doubt you and the whole
household made it to her. Still there always will be regrets and vain
wishes after the death of one we love. What a pity that we can not be
to our friends while they live all we wish we had been after they have
gone! George and I feel an almost childish clinging to mother, while we
hope and believe she will live to bless us if we ever return home.

_Jan. 23d._--We have been afflicted in the sudden death of our dear
friend, Mrs. Wainwright. The news came upon us without preparation--for
she was ill only a few days--and was a great shock to us. You and mother
know what she was to us during the whole time of our acquaintance
with her; I loved her most heartily. I can not get over the saddening
impression which such deaths cause, by receiving new ones; our lives
here are so quiet and uneventful, that we have full leisure to meditate
on the breaches already made in our circle of friends at home, and to
forebode many more such sorrowful tidings. Mrs. Wainwright was like a
_mother_ to me, and I am too old to take up a new friend in her place.
[4]

I do not know whether I mentioned the afflictions of my cousin H. They
have been very great, and have excited my sympathies keenly. Her first
child died when eighteen months old, after a feeble, suffering life.
Then the second child, an amiable, loving creature--I almost see her now
sitting up so straight with her morsel of knitting in her hands!--she
was taken sick and died in five days. Her sister, about eight years old,
came near dying of grief; she neither played, ate or slept, and they
wrote me that her wails of anguish were beyond description. Just as she
was getting a little over the first shock, the little boy, then
about three years old, died suddenly of croup. Poor H. is almost
broken-hearted. I have felt dreadfully at being away when she was so
afflicted; they had not been long enough in New York to have a minister
of their own, and they all said, oh, if George and I had only been
there!

Her letters during the rest of the winter are tinged with the sadness
caused by these and other distressing afflictions among friends at
home. Her sympathies were kept under a constant strain. But her letters
contain also many gleams of sunshine. Although very quiet and secluded,
and often