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 1 76 INTRODUCTION

whose combinations are yet within our power. Whatever may be the destiny of our political life, to the enlightened few a private one will still be left. I shall delight to see you again, but am willing to defer our meeting to your own convenience and interest. Were you still to remain long absent, I should travel to see you, and take lodgings for a time in your neighborhood. I am glad you have seen a prairie, and wish you would preserve a clear picture of it to describe to me, as also of the effects of the syca- more and the cottonwoods, if you saw them growing there. I hope you will keep your mind tranquil by contemplating in every detail the object and the event which now disturb us. I have never found that losing myself in an unnatural activity soothed such afflictions to me, but, by rendering the imagination familiar with every moving circumstance, we become calm through familiarity with our own associa- tions, yet not cold ; even as a tragedy by frequent reading fails to excite tears, yet never destroys in the mind the sense of its pathos.

Do you remember the rhyme where I dotted your little grass plot at Beverly with graves } I hope the event there foreshadowed will not yet prove true. But the two ex- tremes of the group have now met there. I like not to dwell on it, and must drive out of mind the thought. How much of anticipated pleasure I have buried there !

James Reed called on me last night. He evidently loved Stanley, and through fondness for him displayed all the warmer affection for me. It was a meeting too kindly to be forgotten.

I regret that you should have resigned a portion of your salary, and think it not a good business movement. The seven hundred dollars was given as a retaining fee. The only pecuniary loss you should have incurred should have

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