Jany. 31st

Sunday. The Sun this morning rose very bright + clear, but towards noon, a cold wind started from the North and in the afternoon it snowed. Everything looks blue, and I feel blue therefore prepare to have some of my surplus spleen, vented on your unoffending head. Are you ready? Perhaps if I first give my reasons for being blue, you will know better how to laugh or cheer me out of them. In the first place I am blue because I am without you; next because being here I also am not able to hear from you; again, because you did not receive my last letters + will be so anxious to hear from me, + perhaps will get the blues yourself, which gives me a fourth reason viz because I cannot be at hand to comfort you. Poor old girl. Don’t get disheartened, if you do not hear from me nor of me, so often as you could wish, try and think of me as writing to you at that moment. Think that I am well and hearty and strong with a wolfish appetite, + with the means to satisfy it too. Lift up your head and think that by laughing and trying to be happy you are making me so. And Our Father whose unremitting care watches over us, or will gather us tenderly to his bosom. Darling did you ever think of the time when one of us must leave the other, no more to come back? Child I charge you Pray for me as ever, to be kept in the right way, to be made to look at events + trials in their proper light, that I may be kept from useless and causeless repinnings. Lizzie would you mind giving me one of the prayers which you daily use. I would so like to have the same form of words as you have, so that I might feel myself nearer to you, + be more in unison with you. Perhaps you would rather not or cannot single out the one you like best. If you have the slightest hesitancy in agreeing with my proposal please don’t feel obliged to say yes. Will you not dear? There is one prayer I always use, night + morning. It is the Collect for Whitsunday. In the Church Prayer book. I have used it for a long time.

This is the end of the first month of the New Year. How quickly it has gone. Do you remember that song “And the years glide by”? There is an ode in Horace with the self same words – “Labuntur Anni” “And the years glide by” Three years will soon slip away, + then the Homeward Journey – will the long stretches of level prairie seem so endless then? Will the days journey be so stirring then? And when I reach the railway, will not my heart fleetly outrun the huge iron horses. Ah, trust me it there cannot go too fast for me. There is something going on tonight Capt. Winder and a party of armed men have just started off, for somewhere to try and do something – more anon. It is snowing now + is past nine o’clock.