vided it be for your good to continue here) that I shall have the pleasure of receiving many kind letters yet, from the good friend of seventy odd, if not of eighty odd.
With hearty thanks for your kindness in favoring me thus far with your correspondence, and sincere prayers for your temporal and eternal welfare,
I am, dear sir. your very dutiful and affectionate nephew,
To Mr. Moses Fontaine.
Dear Sir:—Your kind favor of 20th June, 1764, now lies before me; and most sincerely am I obliged by the kind promise you make of continuing to give me this proof of your affection. When your annual letter arrives, it yields me much more substantial pleasure than is felt at the feastings on the return of a birth-day. The meltings of heart that I experience when I read your pious letters, leave impressions on my mind that are of real advantage to me. I am persuaded there is a kind of instinct in souls; for though I never saw with my bodily eyes either you or my dear uncle John, yet I am better acquainted with nobody. I indulge myself in forming ideas of you in my mind; and sometimes in an agreeable reverie, enjoy a kind of ideal conversation with you. I seem quite intimate with you both, and so closely united in familiar friendship, that nine-tenths of those I am personally acquainted with, are incapable of affording me half the satisfaction, in repeated interviews, that I reap from only poring over one of your letters once a year.
As to articles of intelligence, I have forestalled myself in my letter to my uncle John, to which I have only to add,
