This is your birthday: you are ten years of age to-day. I sought amidst my papers for some pretty picture to place at the top of this note, but I did not find anything that seemed at all expressive of my interest in your well-being, or well-doing, and so this note comes to you without any such emblem. Let me say, my honest little girl, that I have had you often in my mind during my separation from you and your devoted mother, and well-meaning sisters, while on the sea or the land, and now that I have returned to be with you and them again, meeting you daily at fireside, at table, at study, and in your walk, and amusements, in conversation and in silence, being daily with you, I would have you feel my presence and be the happier, and better that I am here. I want, most of all things, to be a kindly influence on you, helping you to guide and govern your heart, keeping it in a state of sweet and loving peacefulness, so that you may feel how good and kind is that Love which lives always in our breasts, and which we may always feel, if we will keep the passions all in stillness and give up ourselves entirely to its soft desires. I live, my dear daughter, to be good and to do good to all, and especially to you and your mother and sisters. Will you not let me do you all the good that I would? And do you not know that I can do you little or none, unless you give me your affections, incline your ears, and earnestly desire to become daily better and wiser, more kind, gentle, loving, diligent, heedful, serene. The good Spirit comes into the Breast of the meek and loveful to abide long; anger, discontent, impatience, evil appetites, greedy wants, complainings, ill-speakings, idlenesses, heedlessness, rude behaviour and all such, these drive it away, or grieve it so that it leaves the poor misguided soul to live in its own obstinate, perverse, proud discomfort, which is the very _Pain of Sin_, and is in the _Bible_ called the worm that never dies, the gnawing worm, the sting of _CONSCIENCE_: while the pleasures of love and goodness are beyond all description--a peacefulness that passes all understanding. I pray that my daughter may know much of the last, and little of the first of these feelings. I shall try every day to help her to the knowledge and love of this good _Spirit_. I shall be with her, and as she and her sisters come more and more into the presence of this Spirit, shall we become a family more closely united in loves that can never sunder us from each other. This your Father in Hope and Love on your Birthday Concordia, Nov. 29, 1842.