Reaching the land in safety, Mrs. Hopkins and her little family went to Southern Ohio, and we spent a few days in Medina, with Mary's brother, Rev. M. M. Longley. We found that the eight years which had passed since we were East before had made a good many vacant chairs in our home circles. My own father had been called from earth very suddenly, in 1845. He was well and had done a hard day's work, but ere the evening shadows fell he had passed beyond the river. The angel of death and the angel of life had visited Mary's home again and again. First the grandfather, Col. Edmund Longley, had gone to his fathers, at the good old age of ninety-five. Then, in 1848, the _pater familias_, Gen. Thomas Longley, had wrapped his cloak about him and laid him down to rest. The next to hear the summons was the little sister, Henrietta Arms. She had grown to be a woman, and Mary fondly hoped to have her companionship and aid in the Dakota field. But the Master called her up higher. And then, only a few months before we reached Ohio, the loving, cultured, and beloved brother Alfred had passed, through months of weariness and pain, up to the new life and vigor of the heavenly world. He had been preaching for several years in North-eastern Ohio. So many had gone that when we reached the mountain home in Hawley, we found it desolate. Only Joseph and his mother remained. Mary soon persuaded her mother to go down to South Deerfield, that they might together spend the winter with the older sister, Mrs. Cooley. And I went to New York City, and was the next seven months engaged in getting through the press the grammar and dictionary of the Dakota language. Of the various hindrances and delays, and of the burning of the printing-office in which the work was in progress, and the loss of quite a number of pages of the book, which had to be again made up, I need not speak. They are ordinary incidents. Early in the summer of 1852 the work was done,--and done, I believe, to the satisfaction of all parties. It has obtained the commendation of literary men generally, and it was said that for no volume published by the Smithsonian Institution, up to that time, was the demand so great as for that. It is now out of print, and the book can only be bought at fancy prices.