Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

LETTERS. 119
REPLY OF JOHN BROWN.
MRs. L. MARIA CHILD:
MY DEAR FRIEND, — Such you prove to be,
though a stranger,- your most kind letter has
reached me, with the kind offer to come here and
take care of me. Allow me to express my gratitude
for your great sympathy, and at the same time to
propose to you a different course, together with my
reasons for wishing it. I should certainly be greatly
pleased to become personally acquainted with one so
gifted and so kind, but I cannot avoid seeing some
objections to it, under present circumstances. First,
I am in charge of a most humane gentleman, who,
with his family, has rendered me every possible attention I have desired, or that could be of the least
advantage; and I am so recovered of my wounds as
no longer to require nursing. Then, again, it would
subject you to great personal inconvenience and
heavy expense, without doing me any good. Allow
me to name to you another channel through which
you may reach me with your sympathies much more
effectually. I have at home a wife and three young
daughters, the youngest but little over five years old,
the oldest nearly sixteen. I have also two daughtersin-law, whose husbands have both fallen near nme
here. There is also another widow, Mrs. Thompson,
whose husband fell here. Whether she is a mother
or not, I cannot say. All these, my wife included,
live at North Elba, Essex county, New York. I
have a middle-aged son, who has been, in some degree, a cripple from his childhood, who would have
as much as lhe could well do to earn a living. He
was a most dreadful sufferer in Kansas, and lost all