My health and spirits had utterly failed me, and the medical man whom I consulted enjoined me, as I valued my life, to go home.

So home I went, and the change has at once roused and soothed me; and I am now, I trust, fairly in the way to be myself again.
"A calm and even mind like yours cannot conceive the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing to you, when, after weeks of mental and bodily anguish not to be described, something like peace began to dawn again.

Mary is far from well.

She breathes short, has a pain in her chest, and frequent flushings of fever.

I cannot tell you what agony these symptoms give me; they remind me too strongly of my two sisters, whom no power of medicine could save.