Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you--and that follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will (if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England--was a dreadful time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all affectionately always,
/* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. October 29th, 1910. */