"It was a great deprivation to me to be unable to write at sea. I hoped to have had a large packet for the many kind friends who aided and blessed my departure, expressing something of the gratitude which overpowered me. I have sometimes feared that you thought me insensible to it all, for I dared not try to utter even a word of what I felt lest I should lose my self-possession entirely, and trouble them more than my thanks would please them. God alone knows how fully I appreciated it all, and when I look back upon the period which elapsed after my father's death until I left you, I know not how to speak my astonishment that such a one as myself should have been so signally favored. For your Aunt Nancy I can only say her reward must be beyond this world; nothing that I or any one here can do, is adequate to it. Never was a human being so blessed with kind friends, and could I feel that I had been as grateful as I ought to have been, I should be happy. But the entire absorption of every thought in self, during the past winter, is now a subject of much reproach. "I had time to think of all this during the long days and wakeful nights on the voyage, and I do assure you I took a new view of every thing connected with it. Whether it was the absence of every thing else to interest my mind, or the natural increase of our attachment to all objects when we are going from them, I know not, but there were moments of acute agony, when I thought of the return I had made for the kindness manifested towards me. How often I longed to be for a little time on the little stool in the drawing-room, giving utterance to my spirit! There was so little in the monotony of sea-life to interrupt the train of one's thoughts, that I could not sometimes get rid of an idea which possessed me, and I often woke up, wearied with the continuation of one and the same dream, night after night. But I did enjoy a great deal at sea, there was so much to elevate the mind in the very situation; and the want of confidence which I felt from the first evening in the head of the concern tended most powerfully to raise my thoughts above all second causes, to the One Great Cause and Supporter of all things. Never did I so deeply feel our entire dependence upon the power of God, never did I so fully realize the impotence of human skill, as when I saw it contending with the winds; and yet there was something ennobling in the idea, that human skill had contrived and taught to guide such a vehicle as a ship upon the trackless waste of waters; and while we trace all this power to the original source of it, we cannot but feel that He has given to us a noble nature. Often when the sea was rising in immense waves on every side, and the ship