I have not yet made my plans for the summer.  Our doctor urges me to go away from the children and from the salt water, but I do not believe it would do me a bit of good.  I want you to see my dear little boy.  He is now nineteen months old and as fat and well as can be.  He is a beautiful little fellow, we think, and very interesting.  He is as gallant to A. as you please, and runs to get a cushion for her when their supper is carried in, and won’t eat a morsel himself till he sees her nicely fixed.  George has gone to Boston, and I am lonely enough.  I would write another sheet if I dared, but I don’t dare.

What she here says of her happiness, amidst the trials of the previous winter, is repeated a little later in a letter to her husband: 

I can truly say I have not spent a happier winter since our marriage, in spite of all my sickness.  It seems to me I can never recover my spirits and be as I have been in my best days, but what I lose in one way perhaps I shall gain in another.  Just think how my ambition has been crushed at every point by my ill-health, and even the ambition to be useful and a comfort to those about me trampled underfoot, to teach me what I could not have learned in any other school!

In the month of June she went on a visit to Newark, New Jersey, where her husband’s mother and sister now resided; Dr. Stearns having in the fall of 1849 accepted a call to the First Presbyterian church in that city.  While she was in Newark news came of the dangerous illness, and, soon after, of the death at Natchez of her brother-in-law, Mr. S. S. Prentiss.  The event was a great shock to her, and she knew that it would be a crushing blow to her husband.  Her letters to him, written at this time, are full of the tender love and sympathy that infuse solace into sorrow-stricken hearts.  Here is an extract from one of them, dated July 11th: 

I can’t tell you how it grieves and distresses me to have had this long-dreaded affliction come upon you when you were alone.  Though I could do so little to comfort you, it seems as if I must be near you....  But I know I am doing right in staying here—­doing as you would tell me to do, if I could have your direct wish, and you don’t know how thankful I am that it has pleased God to let me be with dear mother at a time when she so needed constant affection and sympathy.  Yes there are wonderful mercies with this heavy affliction, and we all see and feel them.  Poor mother has borne all the dreadful suspense and then the second blow of to-day far better than any of us dared to hope, but she weeps incessantly.  Anna is with her all she can possibly be, and Mr. Stearns is an angel of mercy.  I have prayed for you a great deal this week, and I know God is with you, comforts you, and will enable you to bear this great sorrow.  And yet I can’t help feeling that I want to comfort you myself.  Oh, may we all reap its blessed fruits as long as we live!  Let us withdraw a while from everything else, that we may press nearer to God.