am going to beg you to
shut up the house and come over here. It does seem as if now we two
sisters, left so alone, ought to be able to travel and enjoy
together. You can not know how I long to have you with me; it hurts
every minute to think of you treading round and round, with never a
moment of leisure or enjoyment. Surely you have given a mother's
love and care to our nieces for eight years, and now you can let
them go out from under your eye....

Rachel and I came up from Basingstoke on Sunday to attend a small
reception at Mrs. Jacob Bright's. Her husband has championed woman
suffrage in Parliament for years, and she has led the few who have
dared say, "And married women, too, should have the franchise."
When the powers that be forbade her to include married women in the
Parliamentary Suffrage Bill now pending, Mrs. Bright withdrew and
started a bill for their property rights, which was passed last
session and is now in force.

[Illustration: Autograph: "With kindest regards from Mr. Bright and
myself, yours very truly, Ursula M. Bright"]

Monday morning we went to Bedford Park and spent two hours at
Moncure D. Conway's. His charming wife read us what a delegate here
from the American Unitarians says of Emerson, Alcott, Frothingham
and George Ripley--that all are wearying of their early theories
and theologies and returning to the old faith. Today I had an hour
with William Henry Channing, and he virtually told me this was true
of himself! I exclaimed: "Do you mean to say that you have returned
to the belief in the immaculate conception of Jesus and in the
miracles--that you no longer explain all these things as you used
to do in your Bible readings at Rochester?" He replied: "I never
disbelieved in miracles. Man's levelling and tunnelling the
mountains is a miracle." Well, I was stunned and left. Even if all
these grand men, in old age, or when broken in body, decide that
the conclusions of their early and vigorous manhood were false,
which shall we accept as most likely to be true--the strong or the
weakened thought? It is very disheartening if we are so constituted
that with our deepest, sincerest study we grope and dwell in error
through our threescore and ten, and after those allotted years find
all we believed fact to be mere hal