e is no good reason why I have written this
letter but this,--that have left the greater part of my heart in New
York and naturally turn back to find it. Remind your three [187] houses
of the stock they have in it, bad as it is; and, to be most sadly
serious, remember my very affectionate regards to Mrs. Kirkland, and
give my love to the -s and -s, and believe me,

Ever your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

To the Same.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 1846.

. . . FOR am I not through the one third of the second of the five
months, and am I not very glad of it? And yet I am very glad I came
away. You have no idea how I am relieved, and I shall not go back
empty-handed. But the relief I feel admonishes me never to return to the
full charge. How little do people know or conceive what it is! One case,
like what I fear Mrs.-'s is, of slow decline,-one such case weighs
upon the mind and heart for months. If you could go and make the call,
without any sad anticipation or afterthought; but you cannot. And then,
when it is not one case that draws upon your sympathies, but several,
and you are made the confidant of many sorrows besides, and you are
anxious for many minds; and when, moreover, your studies are not of the
habitudes of bees, and the length of butterflies' wings, but wasting
thoughts of human souls in sorrow and peril, and your Sundays rack your
sinews with pain,--I declare I wonder that men live through it at all.

To the Same.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 1847.

MY DEAR BELLOWS,--I consider it a mercy to you to put some interval
between my letters; indeed, I do [188] not know how you write any, ever;
besides, I feel all the while as if some of your burdens were to be laid
at the door of my delinquencies. . . . Indeed, I rejoice in you always. I
never hear of you but to hear good of you; and it is often that I
hear. . . .

As to the sermons I have been writing here, I consider your suggestion
that you might read since you will not hear them such an enormous
compliment, such a reckless piece of goodness, that all your duties in
regard to them are fully discharged in the bare proposition. And I am
not going to have you canonized and sent down to all ages as the most
suffering saint in the nineteenth century, for having read twelve of
Dewey's manuscript sermons. I have preached one of them this evening,
and it made so much impression (upon, me) that I was quite taken
by surprise. The title is "Nature.". . . Last week I wrote the mos