A note from papa has brought the comforting news that my dear, dear Stormie is in England again, in London, and looking perfectly well.  It is a mercy which makes me very thankful, and would make me joyful if anything could.  But the meanings of some words change as we live on.  Papa’s note is hurried.  It was a sixty-day passage, and that is all he tells me.  Yes—­there is something besides about Sette and Occy being either unknown or misknown, through the fault of their growing.  Papa is not near returning, I think.  He has so much to do and see, and so much cause to be enlivened and renewed as to spirits, that I begged him not to think about me and stay away as long as he pleased.  And the accounts of him and of all at home are satisfying, I thank God....

There is an east wind just now, which I feel.  Nevertheless, Dr. Scully has said, a few minutes since, that I am as well as he could hope, considering the season.

May God bless you ever! 
Your gratefully attached
BA.

To Mrs. Martin March 29, 1841.

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­Have you thought ‘The dream has come true’?  I mean the dream of the flowers which you pulled for me and I wouldn’t look at, even?  I fear you must have thought that the dream about my ingratitude has come true.

And yet it has not.  Dearest Mrs. Martin, it has not.  I have not forgotten you or remembered you less affectionately through all the silence, or longed less for the letters I did not ask for.  But the truth is, my faculties seem to hang heavily now, like flappers when the spring is broken. My spring is broken, and a separate exertion is necessary for the lifting up of each—­and then it falls down again.  I never felt so before:  there is no wonder that I should feel so now.  Nevertheless, I don’t give up much to the pernicious languor—­the tendency to lie down to sleep among the snows of a weary journey—­I don’t give up much to it.  Only I find it sometimes at the root of certain negligences—­for instance, of this toward you.

Dearest Mrs. Martin, receive my sympathy, our sympathy, in the anxiety you have lately felt so painfully, and in the rejoicing for its happy issue.  Do say when you write (I take for granted, you see, that you will write) how Mrs. B——­ is now—­besides the intelligence more nearly touching me, of your own and Mr. Martin’s health and spirits.  May God bless you both!

Ah! but you did not come:  I was disappointed!

And Mrs. Hanford!  Do you know, I tremble in my reveries sometimes, lest you should think it, guess it to be half unkind in me not to have made an exertion to see Mrs. Hanford.  It was not from want of interest in her—­least of all from want of love to you.  But I have not stirred from my bed yet.  But, to be honest, that was not the reason—­I did not feel as if I could, without a painful effort, which, on the other hand, could not, I was conscious, result in the slightest shade of satisfaction to her, receive and talk to her.  Perhaps it is hard for you to fancy even how I shrink away from the very thought of seeing a human face—­except those immediately belonging to me in love or relationship—­(yours does, you know)—­and a stranger’s might be easier to look at than one long known....