You are very dear and good about our ups and downs, and it makes me doubly regret that I cannot reward you by conveying a perfectly truthful impression of our life, etc. here to your mind, I trace in your very dearness and goodness about it, in your worrying more about discomfort for me in our moves than about your own hopes of our meeting at Home, how little able one is to do so by mere letters, I wish it did not lead you to the unwarrantable conclusion that it is because you are “weak and old” that you do not appreciate the uncertainties of our military housekeeping, and can only “admire” the coolness with which I look forward to breaking up our cosy little establishment, just when we were fairly settled down.  You can hardly believe how well I understand your feelings for me, because I have so fully gone through them for myself.  I never had D.’s “spirit” for a wandering life, and it is out of the fulness of my experience that I know and wish unspeakably that I could convey to you, how very much of one’s shrinking dread has all the unreality of fear of an unknown evil.  When I look back to all I looked forward to with fear and trembling in reference to all the strangenesses of my new life, I understand your feelings better than you think.  I am too much your daughter not to be strongly tempted to “beat my future brow,” much more so than to be over-hopeful.  Rex is given that way too in his own line; and we often are brought to say together how inexcusable it is when everything turns out so much better than we expected, and when “God” not only “chains the dog till night,” but often never lets him loose at all!  Still the natural terrors of an untravelled and not herculean woman about the ups and downs of a wandering, homeless sort of life like ours are not so comprehensible by him, he having travelled so much, never felt a qualm of sea-sickness, and less than the average of home-sickness, from circumstances.  It is one among my many reasons for wishing to come Home soon, that one chat would put you in possession of more idea of our passing home, the nest we have built for a season, and the wood it is built in, and the birds (of many feathers) amongst whom we live, than any letters can do....  You can imagine the state of (far from blissful) ignorance of military life, tropical heat, Canadian inns, etc., etc., in which I landed at Halifax after such a sudden wrench from the old Home, and such a very far from cheerful voyage, and all the anecdotes of the summer heat, the winter cold, the spring floods, the houses and the want of houses, the servants and the want of servants, the impossibility of getting anything, and the ruinous expense of it when got! which people pour into the ears of a new-comer just because it is a more sensational and entertaining (and quite as stereotyped) a subject of conversation as the weather and the crops.  The points may be (isolatedly) true; but the whole impression one receives is alarmingly false!  And I can only say that my experience is so totally different from my fears, and from the cook-stories of the “profession,” that I don’t mean to request Rex to leave Our Department at present!...