rs_, and then returning to Washington, whence they had
started, the road being found utterly impassable. Streams swollen with
the winter snows and spring rains, with their bridges all broken up by
the ice or swept away by the water, intersect these delightful ways; and
one of these, which could not admit of fording, turned them back, to try
their fate in a steamboat, through the ice with which the Chesapeake is
blocked up. This dismal account has in some measure reconciled me to
having been left behind with the children; they have neither of them
been as well as usual this winter, and the season is now so far
advanced, our intended departure being delayed from day to day for three
months, that, besides encountering a severe and perilous journey, we
should have arrived in Georgia to find the weather almost oppressively
hot, and, if we did wisely, to return again, at the end of a fortnight,
to the North.

I have come back to Butler Place with the bairns, and have resumed the
monotonous tenor of my life, which this temporary residence in town had
interrupted, not altogether agreeably; and here I shall pass the rest of
the winter, teaching S---- to read, and sliding through my days in a
state of external quietude, which is not always as nearly allied to
content as it might seem to (_ought_ to) be....

When the children's bed-time comes, and their little feet and voices are
still, the spirit of the house seems to have fallen asleep. I send my
servants to bed, for nobody here keeps late hours (ten o'clock being
considered late), and, in spite of assiduous practicing, reading, and
answering of letters, my evenings are sad in their absolute solitude,
and I am glad when ten o'clock comes, the hour for my retiring, which I
could often find in my heart to anticipate....

I have taken vehemently to worsted-work this winter, and, _instead of a
novel or two_, am going to read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," which I have never read, and by means of Bayle, classical
atlas, and the Encyclopaedia, I mean to make a regular school-room
business of it.

Good-bye, dear. Events are so lacking in my present existence, that I am
longing for the spring as I never did before--for the sight of leaves
and flowers, and the song of birds, and the daily development of the
great natural pageant of the year. I am grateful to God for nothing more
than the abundant beauty with which He has adorned His creation. The
pleasure I derive f