Your affectionate

  EDITH.

There were letters to John and Fred in the same packet, and I think you will like to hear one of Fred’s to his sister, giving an account of the Christmas festivities at Frankfort.

  DEAR EDITH,

I am very busy to-day, but I must give you a few lines to tell you how delighted your letters made us.  We are very happy here, but home is the place after all, and it is one of our good Master’s most constant themes.  He is always talking to us about home, and encouraging us to talk of and think of it.  Emilie seems like a sister to us, and she enters into all our feelings as well us you could do yourself.

Well, you will want to know something about our Christmas doings at school.  They have been glorious I can tell you—­such a Christmas tree!  Such a lot of presents in our shoes on Christmas morning; such dinings and suppings, and musical parties!  You must know every one sings here, the servants go singing about the house like nightingales, or sweeter than nightingales to my mind, like our dear “Kanarien Vogel.”

You ask for Joe, he is very patient, and kind and good to us all, he and John are capital friends; and oh, Edith, it would do your heart good to see how John devotes himself to the poor fellow.  He waits upon him like a servant, but it is all love service.  Joe can scarcely bear him out of his sight.  Herr Franks was asked the other day, by a gentleman who came to sup with us, if they were brothers.  John watches all Joe’s looks, and is so careful that nothing may be said to wound him, or to remind him of his great affliction more than needs be.  It was a beautiful sight on New Year’s Eve to see Joe’s boxes that he has carved.  He has become very clever at that work, and there was an article of his carving for every one, but the best was for Emilie, and she deserted it.  Oh, how he loves Emilie!  If he is beginning to feel in one of his old cross moods, he says that Emilie’s face, or Emilie’s voice disperses it all, and well it may; Emilie has sweetened sourer tempers than Joe White’s.

But now comes a sorrowful part of my letter.  Joe is very unwell, he has a cough, (he was never strong you know,) and the doctor says he is very much afraid his lungs are diseased.  He certainly gets thinner and weaker, and he said to me to-day what I must tell you.  He spoke of his longings to travel (to go to Australia was always his fancy.) “And now, Fred,” he said, “I never think of going there, I am thinking of a longer journey still.”  “A longer journey, Joe!” I said, “Well, you have got the travelling mania on you yet, I see.”  He looked so sad, that I said, “What do you mean Joe?” He replied, “Fred, I think nothing of journeys and voyages in this world now.  I am thinking of a pilgrimage to the land where all our wandering’s will have an end.  I longed, oh Fred, you know how I longed to go to foreign