life, my own heart aches for pity. Let yours sympathize with it.

I thought to be so active, so useful, perhaps so distinguished as a man,
so blest as husband and father!--for you must know how from my boyhood
up I have craved, what I have never had, a home.

Now that I have been thrust out of active life and forced to make up my
mind to perfect passiveness, I have become a bugbear to myself. I cannot
endure the thought of ever being the peevish egotist, the exacting
tyrant, which men are apt to become when they are thrown upon woman's
love and long-suffering, as I am.

My only safeguard is, I believe, to keep up interests out of myself, and
I beg of you to help me. I believe implicitly in your expressed desire
to be of some service to me, and I ask you to undertake the troublesome
task of correspondence with a sick man, and almost a stranger. I will,
however, try to make you acquainted with myself and my surroundings, so
thoroughly that the latter difficulty will soon be obviated.

First, let me present my sister,--named Catalina,--called Kate, Catty,
or Lina, according to the fancy of the moment, or the degree of
sentimentality in the speaker. You have not seen her since she was a
child, so that, of course, you cannot imagine her as she is now. But you
know the circumstances in which our parents left us. You remember, that,
after living all his life in careless luxury, my father died penniless.
Our mother had secured her small fortune for Kate; and at her death,
just before my father's, she gave me--an infant a few weeks old--into my
sister's young arms, with full trust that I should be taken care of by
her. You know of all my obligations to her in my babyhood and for my
education, which she drudged at teaching for years to obtain for me. I