Page:An emigrant's home letters.djvu/12

 before she left her home, and she married him some months afterwards, she being twenty-three and he twenty-one. They married without any provision for their wedded life, except the work they could obtain from day to day, and went back from Edgbaston to live in the little room in Birmingham where she had lodged while alone. My father's relatives were very good to her, and she used often to tell me about the daily visits she and her little brown dog paid to the old father of the husband she so fondly loved. They had a bitter struggle for existence, and lost two children. Then they decided to go to London, with an idea of emigrating to Australia,—which, to their untutored minds, must indeed have appeared a veritable land of convicts and blackfellows, but still the 'land of promise' where the}' might prosper as they could not do at home.

My father had three sisters—Sarah, Maria, and Eliza, These letters are chiefly addressed to the eldest, Sarah, to whom he was greatly attached, and of whom he thus writes to my mother in 1861:—

'All is now over. Poor Sarah died this morning at two o'clock, Next to you and our dear children I have now lost the dearest