Jan. 23d.—­We have been afflicted in the sudden death of our dear friend, Mrs. Wainwright.  The news came upon us without preparation—­for she was ill only a few days—­and was a great shock to us.  You and mother know what she was to us during the whole time of our acquaintance with her; I loved her most heartily.  I can not get over the saddening impression which such deaths cause, by receiving new ones; our lives here are so quiet and uneventful, that we have full leisure to meditate on the breaches already made in our circle of friends at home, and to forebode many more such sorrowful tidings.  Mrs. Wainwright was like a mother to me, and I am too old to take up a new friend in her place. [4]

I do not know whether I mentioned the afflictions of my cousin H. They have been very great, and have excited my sympathies keenly.  Her first child died when eighteen months old, after a feeble, suffering life.  Then the second child, an amiable, loving creature—­I almost see her now sitting up so straight with her morsel of knitting in her hands!—­she was taken sick and died in five days.  Her sister, about eight years old, came near dying of grief; she neither played, ate or slept, and they wrote me that her wails of anguish were beyond description.  Just as she was getting a little over the first shock, the little boy, then about three years old, died suddenly of croup.  Poor H. is almost broken-hearted.  I have felt dreadfully at being away when she was so afflicted; they had not been long enough in New York to have a minister of their own, and they all said, oh, if George and I had only been there!

Her letters during the rest of the winter are tinged with the sadness caused by these and other distressing afflictions among friends at home.  Her sympathies were kept under a constant strain.  But her letters contain also many gleams of sunshine.  Although very quiet and secluded, and often troubled by torturing neuralgic pains, as well as by sudden shocks of grief, her life at Montreux was not without its own peculiar joys.  One of the greatest of these was to while away the twilight or evening hours in long talks with her husband about home and former days.  Distance, together with the strange Alpine scenes about her, seemed to have the effect of a score of years in separating her from the past, and throwing over it a mystic veil of tenderness and grace.  Old times and old friends, when thus viewed from the beautiful shores of Lake Leman, appeared to the memory in a softened light and invested with something of that ideal loveliness which the grave itself imparts to the objects of our affections.  Many of these old friends, indeed, had passed through the Grave—­some, long before, some recently—­and to talk of them was sweet talk about the blessed home above, as well as the home beyond the ocean.

Another joy that helped to relieve the monotony and weariness of the Montreux life, was in her children; especially as, on the approach of spring, she wandered with them over the hill-sides in quest of flowers; then her delight knew no bounds.  In a letter to Mrs. Washburn, dated March 19, she writes: