_May 9._--My dearest, dearest wife still alive, and not apparently worse than yesterday. Oh! if it were the Lord's holy blessed will to spare her, it would indeed rejoice my poor foolish heart, but the Lord has enabled me to cast my wife, myself, and my dear dear children on his holy love, and to await the issue. Oh! what wrath there must be against these lands, if not only the inhabitants are swept away, but the Lord transplants also his own, who would teach them, to his own garden of peace. My soul has just been refreshed by these two verses of Psalm 116. "Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. He has taken one of thy olive branches to glory, and is now perhaps about to take another, for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, for he only takes them from the evil to come." Oh, but for Jesus, the never setting star of our heavenly way, amidst the wilderness what would our situation now be. Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and our heavenly Father's love we have too often proved to doubt it now. But, poor nature is bowed very very low, when I look at my dear boys and little babe, and see only poor little Kitto to be left for their care for hundreds of miles around; it needs all those consolations of God's spirit to keep the soul from sinking also with the body; but the Lord has said, "Leave your fatherless children unto me," and to him we desire to leave them. We did feel assured that the Lord would spare our dear little united happy family; but his ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts. Dear little Kitto, I feel for his situation also from my heart.