"It is long since I have written to you, but I have little of variety to detail. I spent a fortnight in November, and another in December, in Boston, helping Dr. John in the completion of his work, and since my return, three weeks ago, I have been very fully employed as nurse and maid of all work; for I found C----, W----, H----, and my Margaret, all sick. E---- too has not been well. Help is not to be got here extempore, and, with the exception of two nights from a nurse, I had no aid, until within a few days I have had a little girl of thirteen. You know something about such concatenations, and need not be told, that under such circumstances one finds no time for anything but supplying the bodily wants of those about us. Add to this, that I have been more than half sick myself all the time with one of my tedious coughs, keeping me awake at night and tiring me terribly in the day. "Only think of Emma's trip to England,--and, good soul, that she should go and see 'Cousin Jane' for me, and George Lovell, too! Does she not always do more than any one else? "Your faithful "M. L. W." * * * * * "_Milton, December 31, 1846._ "Thirty years, is it not, dear N----, since I began to make you my mother-confessor upon this anniversary? A long life, as some people would have used it; a long life it seems to me, as I look back to that first hour of consciousness that there was one being in the world to whom I could be as egotistical as I pleased, with impunity. A long life it has truly been to me, not so much in its usefulness or improvement, as in the variety of its experiences, internal as well as external. In fact, it seems like many lives; and as I survey different portions of it in retrospect, I can scarcely believe in my own identity with the being who appears upon the stage in each. How has it been with you? I am anxious to know whether others are as sensible as I am of a change of character from the influence of circumstances. We are wont to say, and I think I have seen strong proof of the truth of the assertion,--that 'the child is father to the man.' In truth, he is the future man, in all the leading traits of his character, as well at five as at fifty years of age; and yet I do feel as if I were not the same being that I was three years ago. Whether it is that I am growing old and losing my faculties, or whether the responsibilities of life have paralyzed my mind, or that the loss of that refreshment to the spirit which comes from the reciprocation of an affection for which there is no substitute, has exhausted my strength by depriving me of my spirit's resting-place, I know not. But certain it is, that from being a person of some