This letter was addressed to his sister Jane. In another to her, written a few weeks later, he said, "I am glad you have resolved to visit sister Dowse oftener; it will be a great comfort to her to find she is not neglected by you, and your example may, perhaps, be followed by some others of her relations." In the succeeding year, when he was settled in England, he writes to his sister Jane, "My wife will let you see my letter, containing an account of our travels, which I would have you read to sister Dowse, and give my love to her." Another sister of Franklin, Mary, married Captain Robert Holmes. He was the master of a sloop that plied between Boston and the Delaware, and, when he heard at New Castle that his run-a-way brother-in-law was living in Philadelphia, he wrote to him begging him to return to Boston, and received from him a reply, composed with so much literary skill that Governor Keith of Pennsylvania, when the letter was shown to him by Holmes, declared that the writer appeared to be a young man of promising parts, and should be encouraged. Mrs. Holmes died of cancer of the breast, which is responsible for the only occasion perhaps on which Franklin was ever known to incline his ear to the virtues of a nostrum. We have here in town [he wrote to his sister Jane] a kind of shell made of some wood, cut at a proper time, by some man of great skill (as they say), which has done wonders in that disease among us, being worn for some time on the breast. I am not apt to be superstitiously fond of believing such things, but the instances are so well attested, as sufficiently to convince the most incredulous. Another sister of Franklin, Lydia, married Robert Scott, but our information about her is very meagre. This is also true of Anne Harris, still another sister of his. We do know, however, that some of her family wandered away to London before Franklin left America on his mission to France, and that one of them took pains to apprise him of her urgent wants after he arrived there. She was, she said, "Obliged to Worke very hard and Can But just git the common necessarys of life," and therefore had "thoughts of going into a family as housekeeper ... having lived in that station for several years and gave grate satisfaction." With a curious disregard to existing conditions, quite unworthy of her connection with her illustrious relative, she even asked him to aid her in securing the promotion of her son in the British Navy. A daughter of this sister, Grace Harris, married Jonathan Williams, a Boston merchant engaged in the West India trade, who enjoyed the honor of acting as the moderator of the meetings held at Faneuil Hall in 1773 for the purpose of preventing the landing of the odious tea. She must have been an elated mother when she received from her uncle in 1771 a letter in which he spoke of her two sons in these terms: