All through his Cawnpore life, also, the wail of disappointed love breaks from time to time. On Christmas day, 1809, he received, through David Brown as usual, a letter 'from Lydia, containing a second refusal; so now I have done.' On March 23, 1810, Mr. Steven's letter reached him, reporting the death of his last sister. 'She was my dear counsellor and guide for a long time in the Christian way. I have not a relation left to whom I feel bound by ties of Christian fellowship, and I am resolved to form no new connection of a worldly nature, so that I may henceforward hope to live entirely, as a man of another world.' Meanwhile he has received Lydia Grenfell's sisterly offer, to which he thus replies in the first of eleven letters, to one who had sunk the lover in the Christian friend, as was possible to two hearts so far separated and never to meet again in this world. But she was still his 'dearest.' TO LYDIA GRENFELL Cawnpore: March 30, 1810. Since you kindly bid me, my beloved friend, consider you in the place of that dear sister whom it has pleased God in His wisdom to take from me, I gratefully accept the offer of a correspondence, which it has ever been the anxious wish of my heart to establish. Your kindness is the more acceptable, because it is shown in the day of affliction. Though I had heard of my dearest sister's illness some months before I received the account of her death, and though the nature of her disorder was such as left me not a ray of hope, so that I was mercifully prepared for the event, still the certainty of it fills me with anguish. It is not that she has left me, for I never expected to see her more on earth. I have no doubt of meeting her in heaven, but I cannot bear to think of the pangs of dissolution she underwent, which have been unfortunately detailed to me with too much particularity. Would that I had never heard them, or could efface them from my remembrance. But oh, may I learn what the Lord is teaching me by these repeated strokes! May I learn meekness and resignation. May the world always appear as vain as it does now, and my own continuance in it as short and uncertain. How frightful is the desolation which Death makes, and how appalling his visits when he enters one's family. I would rather never have been born than be born and die, were it not for Jesus, the Prince of life, the Resurrection and the Life. How inexpressibly precious is this Saviour when eternity seems near! I hope often to communicate with you on these subjects, and in return for your kind and consolatory letters to send you, from time to time, accounts of myself and my proceedings. Through you I can hear of all my friends in the West. When I first heard of the loss I was likely to suffer, and