"I cannot write you more than a few words, I am so much pressed on all sides by matters which cannot be put off; but I must say these few, to assure you of the peace and repose which are with us, and have been, I may say, ever since you were here. O that you had been with us longer,--that you could have been with me at that still hour when the spirit was freed from its prison-house, the weary body left to its rest! And it was rest. Could you have seen the very 'rapture of repose' depicted upon that face, which had so long been disturbed by the pressure of disease that its very expression had been changed to a character foreign to the whole man! All continued of the same peaceful character which pervaded our atmosphere when you were here, with the exception of a few days of a little temporary uneasiness about the time C---- R---- was here. And the last fatal attack, coming as it did at a moment of rather unusual brightness, was so sudden and so soon over, that there was no time for change. Dear little Charlie, who had just returned, was at the moment bounding, in the height of his joyous spirits, from one side of the bed to the other, exclaiming, 'Sall I buss the flies off you, father?' He was taken at once to bed; and when he came down in the morning he found his dear father lying just as he had left him the night before, looking only more peaceful, more beautiful, and he took up the same thought,--'Sall I buss the flies off father, now he has gone to heaven?' I felt it a peculiar blessing, that all the circumstances of the event were such as to make any movement or change in any external respect unnecessary, so that the children might have their first associations with the fact of death without any horror, and their recollection of their father uninterrupted by any repulsive details. He lay in his bed just as he had when talking with them, until he was removed from the house, and that process the little ones did not witness. I doubt not it will give a tone to their view of the subject through life. But why should I dwell upon these externals? Simply that you may dismiss from your mind any thoughts of distress connected with us at that moment; and you know all that I can tell you of the spirit _within_.