cheating train of earthly things. The rest of the family are
moderately well. I have been for some days worse than I have been
for 8 months past, but I may soon get better. I am in the same way
I have often been in before, but there is no security for it always
being so, for I know that it cannot be far from the time when I
will be one of those that once were. I have no other news to send
you, and as little heart for them. I hope you will take the
earliest opportunity of writing that you can, and be particular as
regards Margaret, for she requires consolation.'

He died exactly a week after writing this letter, but my mother was
to live for another forty-four years. And joys of a kind never
shared in by him were to come to her so abundantly, so long drawn
out that, strange as it would have seemed to him to know it, her
fuller life had scarce yet begun. And with the joys were to come
their sweet, frightened comrades pain and grief; again she was to
be touched to the quick, again and again to be so ill that 'she is
in life, we can say no more,' but still she had attendants very
'forward' to help her, some of them unborn in her father's time.

She told me everything, and so my memories of our little red town
are coloured by her memories. I knew it as it had been for
generations, and suddenly I saw it change, and the transformation
could not fail to strike a boy, for these first years are the most
impressionable (nothing that happens after we are twelve matters
very much); they are also the most vivid years when we look back,
and more vivid the farther we have to look, until, at the end, what
lies between bends like a hoop, and the extremes meet. But though
the new town is to me a glass through which I look at the old, the
people I see passing up and down these wynds, sitting, nightcapped,