Honoured sir, Your most dutiful and loving son, ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL. * * * * * THE SECOND LETTER. I am now the happiest man alive; the prosperous part of my wife's predictions, which I mentioned to you in my last, is come in some measure to pass. The child she has brought me proves a boy, and as fine a one as I ever beheld, (if fondness for my own makes me not blind); and sure it cannot be fondness, because other plain circumstances joined at his birth to prove it a more than ordinary remarkable one. He was born with a caul upon his head, which we count one of the luckiest signs that can be in nature; he had likewise three teeth ready cut through the gums, and we reckon that an undeniable testimony and promise given to the world by nature, that she intends such a person for her extraordinary favourite, and that he is born for great things, which I daily beg of heaven may come to pass. Since I have known for some months what it is to be a father, it adds a considerable weight to those affections which I had for my wife. I thought that my tenderness for her was at the height of perfection before; which shows how little we know of those parts of nature that we have yet never tried, and of which we have not yet been allotted our share to act upon the stage of life. I find that I did love her then as well as a husband could love a wife, that is, a wife without a child; but the love to a wife that has a child, is a feeling wonderful and inexpressibly different. A child is the seal and the pledge of love. Meditating upon this, has likewise doubled my affection to you. I loved you before, as a son, and because as such, I felt your tenderness; but my love is much increased now, because I know the tenderness which you felt for me as a father. With these pleasing images of thought, I often keep you nearer company at this vast distance, than when I lived irregularly under your eye. These reflections render a solitary life dear to me. And though I have no manner of acquaintance with her relations, who hate me, as I am told, nor indeed with almost any of the inhabitants, but my own domestics, and those I am forced to deal with, yet I have as much, methinks, as I wish for, unless I could come over to Shetland and live with you, which I the more ardently desire, because I think I and my wife could be true comforts to you, in your advanced years; now I know what living truly is. I am daily persuading my wife to go with me; but she denies me with kind expressions, and says, she owes too much to the place, however less pleasant in itself than other climates, where she had the happiness of first joining hands with me in wedlock, ever to part from it.