d not apparently
worse than yesterday. Oh! if it were the Lord's holy blessed will to
spare her, it would indeed rejoice my poor foolish heart, but the Lord
has enabled me to cast my wife, myself, and my dear dear children on
his holy love, and to await the issue. Oh! what wrath there must be
against these lands, if not only the inhabitants are swept away, but
the Lord transplants also his own, who would teach them, to his own
garden of peace. My soul has just been refreshed by these two verses
of Psalm 116. "Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath
dealt bountifully with thee. He has taken one of thy olive branches to
glory, and is now perhaps about to take another, for precious in the
sight of the Lord is the death of his saints, for he only takes them
from the evil to come." Oh, but for Jesus, the never setting star of
our heavenly way, amidst the wilderness what would our situation now
be. Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and our
heavenly Father's love we have too often proved to doubt it now. But,
poor nature is bowed very very low, when I look at my dear boys and
little babe, and see only poor little Kitto to be left for their care
for hundreds of miles around; it needs all those consolations of God's
spirit to keep the soul from sinking also with the body; but the Lord
has said, "Leave your fatherless children unto me," and to him we
desire to leave them.

We did feel assured that the Lord would spare our dear little united
happy family; but his ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our
thoughts. Dear little Kitto, I feel for his situation also from my
heart.

All the conversation of my dear dying wife, for these twelve months
past, but especially as our difficulties and trials increased, was on
the peace she enjoyed in the Lord. Often and often she has said to me,
notwithstanding the disparity of every thing external, I never in
England enjoyed that sweet sense of my Lord's loving care that I have
enjoyed in Bagdad. And her assurance of her Lord's love never forsook
her, even after she felt herself attacked by the plague. While
contemplating the mysteriousness of the Providence, her mind was
overwhelmed; but when she thought on her Lord's love, she was
confident in his graciousness. From almost the first, her brain has
been so oppressed, that with difficulty she opens her eyes, and though
she can answer a question of two or three words, Yes, or No; yet, if
it involves the slighte