"I cannot tell you how much your visit to Burcombe gratified me; you could not have obliged me more, for I should have been so suspicious that my own description of it and its inhabitants might be a partial one, that I doubt if I should really have done them justice at home: Jane was as much pleased with the effort you made to see them, as any one could possibly be, and more pleased with the visit itself than I choose to tell you. I have most kind letters from the family at Penrith, offering to come for me whenever I give the word of command; it is a delightful rest to look forward to, but it will, I fear, be long before I can avail myself of it. The thoughts of home are to me now something like the dreams one has of heaven, in the twilight hours between sleeping and waking; I dare not form any definite picture, and yet the idea will not be wholly discarded. But with so much around me to make me realize the uncertainty of life, and exposed to actual danger every moment, how can I presume even to hope? May I be able to say from the heart, 'Thy will be done.'
"I wrote Emma a hurried letter a few weeks since, giving an account of my poor cousin's illness and death, and then hoped that I should soon be able to tell a happier tale, to relieve the anxiety which that might have produced. But it is not yet in my power, and I should not venture to write at all, did I not hope that all your uneasiness on my account will find an antidote in the confidence which daily experience increases in my heart, that He whose arm is mighty to save, and who has hitherto protected me from all danger, will still extend to me his fatherly care, and guide and guard me under all the events of his providence. You will readily believe that I have need of this confidence to strengthen me, when I tell you that I am writing this by the bedside of the eldest of those two dear little orphans whom my cousin left in my care. His little brother had scarcely recovered from his fever, when I was obliged to leave him to attend this poor child with the same fever, and have now been for more than a week his sole nurse, night and day.
"But to give you an adequate idea of the peculiarly trying situation in which I have been placed for the last seven weeks, I must recapitulate the story, which you may perhaps have gathered in unconnected details from my letters to Emma. It is indeed a melancholy one, but proves to me most painfully that our steps are oftentimes guided by a wisdom from above, far beyond our own limited conceptions. You know that one of my objects in coming to England was to try to do something more than I had hitherto been enabled to, for the comfort of my poor old aunt, and you will not therefore be surprised that it was my fixed resolution not to return until I had an opportunity of ascertaining how to do this most effectually. When at last I did get here, it was with the expectation of staying only just long enough to see that she was made comfortable. I knew nothing of her family even by name, and of herself only that she was old and feeble, and subject to fits of extreme melancholy. I had not any anticipations of pleasure, except from the feeling that I was doing what my dear father would have done, and fulfilling one of the duties of my life. My father had been her idol through life, and, as I have now found, almost her sole dependence; her children could do little for her, and the relations she had in England knew nothing of her. She was of course most delighted to see me, and prepared to devote herself with all her faculties to my comfort. But, poor body, she stood in need of all that I could do to comfort to her.