The marriage of your dear mother, and the necessity of her being so far separated from the home of her parents, away here in Louisiana, where there is no Protestant Church, and among strangers, whose isolated lives throw an almost impassable barrier in the way of social intercourse, made it incumbent on me to remain with her a greater part of the time. Your father gave your mother's parents a very cordial and pressing invitation to spend their winters with them, promising that they would always pass the summer with us, and that we should never be separated from our precious only child. But the business relations of your grandfather made it impossible for him to do more than to pay a visit of five or six weeks during the winter; but with the tender feeling of the father he was willing to submit to the self-denial of separation from his wife, that she might be with the darling of their united hearts. In one of his letters he says, "You ask me, in your last, how I am getting on, I must be honest and say, bad enough. If I were not tied hand and foot I would cut loose from these cold regions and lonely habitations, and fly away to my 'ain wifey, and my ain bairns' in the sunny south." Again he says, when longing to see me, "But I would not have you come too soon, as I know how changeable March and April are here, and how delightful they must be in Louisiana." At another time he says, "Kiss Louis, Lizzie and the babies for me, and believe me that whatever claims business or other ties, may have one me, my heart is ever with my dear ones." In the winter of 1855 he was elected "President of the Bank of Missouri." I find among my newspaper slips, an article relative to that fact which I will copy: "We announced in our article of Friday last that the name of Joseph Charless, Esq., would probably pass through the Legislature, as the new President of the 'Bank of the State of Missouri.' The Telegraph of this morning announces his election to that important post. "It is proper for us to say to our distant readers, who Mr. Charless is, and we shall assume to speak of his capacity for the important post confided to him, by the Legislative wisdom of the State.