“July 29th, 1818. This, my darling children, is the first anniversary which has come round of our irreparable loss. It has indeed been a year of affliction to us, for much as we were prepared for the inevitable blow as regarded your dear mother, still the awful reality was severely felt. This was soon followed by another as severe, and unexpected. Your dear brother was called in a few days after the departure of his angelic mother to follow her to the grave; but that is not the view in which we should contemplate our dear departed saints. They were mercifully called to meet each other in heaven. How benignly does the Almighty temper our afflictions, that we may be enabled to support our trials. Had there been an apprehension of such a calamity befalling us, as the loss we experienced in the course of one short month, we should have doubted our power to sustain it; but when the last afflicting tidings came, they found us already prostrate before the throne of mercy, humbly endeavouring to resign ourselves to the Divine Will, and in such a frame more able to support the pressure of adversity, than if it had visited us during some of those periods of indescribable happiness, which our bountiful and merciful Creator has so frequently been pleased to bestow upon us. When the loss of your dear brother was announced to me, bitter as the affliction was, it came accompanied with a source of consolation of which the effect was instantaneous. The idea that his mother had been spared the misery of such a loss, that they had met in heaven, that their sufferings were at an end; that they had been mutually spared the wretchedness of mourning for each other; these comforting reflections instantly crowded into my mind, and saved me from much of the anguish which I must have endured at any other period.