We waited in the deepest anxiety for several days, always hoping that we would hear some tidings concerning him, but none came. I therefore wrote to the War-Office, and I wrote also to his Colonel. From the War-Office I received a letter from a clerk, saying that he was commanded to inform me, that they could give me no information relative to Lieutenant Goldie, beyond what was contained in the public prints. The whole letter did not exceed three lines. You would have said that the writer had been employed to write a certain number of letters in a day, at so much a day, and the sooner he got through his work the better. I set it down in my mind that he had never had a son amissing on the field of battle, or he never would have written an anxious and sorrowing father such a cold scrawl. He did not even say that, if they got any tidings concerning my son, they would make me acquainted with them. He was only commanded to tell me that they did not know what I was, beyond every thing on earth, desirous to ascertain. Though perhaps, I ought to admit that, in a time of war, the clerks in the War-Office had something else to do than enter particularly into the feelings of every father that had a son in the army, and to answer all his queries. From the Colonel, however, I received a long, and a very kind letter. He said many flattering things in praise of my gallant laddie, and assured me that the whole regiment deplored his being separated from them. He, however, had no doubt but that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and that, in some exchange of prisoners, or in the event of a peace, he would be restored to his parents and country again. This letter gave us some consolation. It encouraged us to cherish the hope of pressing our beloved son again to our breasts, and of looking on his features, weeping and wondering at the alterations which time, war, and imprisonment had wrought upon them. But more than three years passed away, and not a syllable did we hear concerning him, that could throw the least light upon where he was, or whether he was dead or living. Anxiety preyed sadly upon his mother's health as well as upon her spirits, and I could not drive away a settled melancholy. About that time a brother of mine, who was a bachelor, died in the East Indies, and left me four thousand pounds. This was a great addition to our fortune, and we hardly knew what to do with it. I may say that it made us more unhappy, for we thought that we had nobody to leave it to; and he who ought to have inherited it, and whom it would have made independent, we knew not whether he was in the land of the living, or a strange corpse in a foreign grave. Yet I resolved that, for his sake, I would not spend one farthing of it, but let it lie at interest; and I even provided in a will which I made, that unless he cast up, and claimed it, no one should derive any benefit from either principal or interest until fifty years after my death.