"Dear Mr. Will,—I am very sorry for you to have to go away from brother Jim.
"I would kiss you if you were here.
I have this precious bit of paper now; the letters are faded, and the paper is worn thin and ragged; it is many years old. Jim's letters were full of Ally, especially during his vacations, which were always spent at the parsonage. Sometimes he was grieved at my seeming lack of sympathy about the child. He once wrote:—
"I don't know if I bore you about Ally. You never ask a question about her, and sometimes I think you have forgotten our life in the old parsonage, you say so little of them all. But it don't seem like you, Will, to leave off loving anybody that loves you, and they all do love you just as well to-day as the day we rode off together on the stage. If you don't care about them as you used to, and would rather not hear so much about them, do tell me, so I need n't write it any more."
Leave off loving! No, it was not like me. In my reply to this letter I said:—
"I hope you will never think, because I do not speak of or to people, that I have ceased to love them. I do not love you, or Dominie, or Mrs. Allen, or Ally any less than I did three years ago. You will never learn, I suppose, that words are not with me natural expressions of feeling."
