’Still there will be seasons of loneliness and sadness, and it seems to me as if it always was so in the case of all the people of whom we read in the Bible.  Our Lord distinctly taught His disciples to expect it to be so, and even experienced this sorrow of heart Himself, filling up the full measure of His cup of bitterness.  So I don’t learn that I ought exactly to wish it to be otherwise, so much is said in the Bible about being made partaker of His, sufferings, only I pray that it may please God to bear me up in the midst of it.  I must repeat that your example is constantly before me, as a witness to the power that God gives of enduring pain and sickness.  It is indeed, and great comfort it gives me.  He is not indeed keeping you still in the world without giving you a work to do, and enabling you from your bed of sickness to influence strongly a circle of friends.

’God bless you for all your kindness to me, and watchfulness over me as a child, for your daily thought of me and prayers for me, and may He grant that I may wear your precious gift not only on but in my heart.

’Always your very affectionate

’J.  C. Patteson.

’P.S.—­I do not expect to sail for three weeks; this morning I had a line about the ship, and they say that she cannot be ready for a fortnight.’

On Christmas-day, he was presented with a Bible subscribed for by the whole Alfington population.  Here is a sentence from his letter of acknowledgment:—­

’If these poor needy souls can, from love to a fellow creature whom they have known but a few months, deny themselves their very crumb of bread to show their affection, what should be our conduct to Him from whom we have received all things, and to whom we owe our life, strength, and all that we possess?’

The farewell service was said by one of these poor old people to be like a great funeral.  Sexagesima Sunday was Sir John’s sixty-sixth birthday, and it was spent in expectation that it would be the last of the whole party at home, for on the Monday Sir John was obliged to go to London for a meeting of the Judicial Committee.  The two notes his son wrote during his absence are, perhaps to prove good spirits, full of the delights of skating, which were afforded by the exceptionally severe frost of February 1855, which came opportunely to regale with this favourite pastime one who would never tread on solid ice again.  He wrote with zest of the large merry party of cousins skating together, of the dismay of the old housekeeper when he skimmed her in a chair over the ice, sighing out, in her terror, ‘My dear man, don’t ye go so fast,’ with all manner of endearing expressions—­of the little boys to whom he threw nuts to be scrambled for, and of his own plunge through the thinner ice, when, regardless of drenched garments, he went on with the sport to the last, and came home with clothes frozen as stiff as a board.

He was not gone when his father and brother came home on the twenty-sixth, prepared to go with him to Southampton.