If I loved you less, my dear Anna, I could write you twenty letters where I now can hardly get courage to undertake one.  How very dearly I do love you I never knew, till it rushed upon my mind that we might sometime lose you as we have lost dear Abby.  How mysteriously your and Mary’s and my baby are given us just at this very time, when our hearts are so sore that we are almost afraid to expose them to new sufferings by taking in new objects of affection!  But it does seem to me a great mercy that, trying as it is in many respects, these births and this death come almost hand in hand.  Surely we three young mothers have learned lessons of life that must influence us forever in relation to these little ones!

I have been like one in the midst of a great cloud, since the birth of our baby, entirely unconscious how much I love her; but I am just beginning to take comfort in and feel sensible affection for her.  I long to show the dear little good creature to you.  But I can hardly give up my long-cherished plans and hopes in regard to Abby’s seeing and loving our first child.  Almost as much as I depended on the sympathy and affection of my own mother in relation to this baby, I was depending on Abby’s.  But I rejoice that she is where she is, and would not have her back again in this world of sin and conflict and labor, for a thousand times the comfort her presence could give.  But you don’t know how I dread going home next summer and not finding her there!  It was a great mercy that you could go down again, dear Anna.  And indeed there are manifold mercies in this affliction—­how many we may never know, till we get home to heaven ourselves and find, perhaps, that this was one of the invisible powers that helped us on our way thither.  I had a sweet little note from your mother to-day.  I would give anything if I could go right home, and make her adopt me as her daughter by a new adoption, and be a real blessing and comfort to her in this lonely, dark time.  Eddy Hopkins calls my baby his.  How children want to use the possessive case in regard to every object of interest!

I find the blanket that Mrs. Gibbs knit for me so infinitely preferable, from its elasticity, to common flannel, that I could not help knitting one for you.  If I say that I have thought as many affectionate thoughts to you, while knitting it, as it contains stitches, I fancy I speak nothing but truth and soberness—­for I love you now with the love I have returned on my heart from Abby, who no longer is in want of earthly friends.  Dear little baby thought I was knitting for her special pleasure, for her bright eyes would always follow the needles as she lay upon my lap, and she would smile now and then as if thanking me for my trouble.  The ladies have given her an elegant cloak, and Miss Arnold has just sent her a little white satin bonnet that was made in England, and is quite unlike anything I ever saw.  Only to think, I walked down to church last Sunday and heard George preach once more!