sake to have a bright sunlight streaming into the chamber, and to keep my eyes and ears on the alert for the same cause, how still we used to think the house must be left when my father had these headaches and how mother busied herself all day long about him, and how nice his little plate of hot steak used to look, as he sat up to eat it when the sickness had gone—­and how I am suffering here all alone with nobody to give me even a look of encouragement.  George was out of town on my sickest day.  When he was at home he did everything in the world he could do to keep the children still, but here they must be and I must direct about every trifle and have them on the bed with me.  I am getting desperate and feel disposed to run furiously in the traces till I drop dead on the way.  Don’t think me very wicked for saying so.  I am jaded in soul and body and hardly know what I do want.  If T. comes, George, at all events, will get relief and that will take a burden from my mind....  I want Lina to come this summer.  There is a splendid swing on iron hooks under a tree, at the house we are going to move into.  Won’t that be nice for Jeanie and Mary’s other children, if they come?  I wish I had a little fortune, not for myself but to gather my “folks” together with.  I shall not write you, my dear, another complaining letter; do excuse this.

This letter shows the extremity of her trouble; but it is a picture, merely.  The reality was something beyond description; only young mothers, who know it by experience, can understand its full meaning.  Now, however, the storm for a while abated.  The young relative, whose loving devotion had ministered to the comfort of her dying mother, came to her own relief and passed the next six months at New Bedford, helping take care of Eddy.  In the course of the spring, too, his worst symptoms disappeared and hope took the place of fear and despondency.  Referring to this period, his mother writes in Eddy’s journal: 

On the Saturday succeeding his birth, we heard of my dear mother’s serious illness, and, when he was about three weeks old, of her death.  We were not surprised that his health suffered from the shock it thus received.  He began at once to be affected with distressing colic, which gave him no rest day or night.  His father used to call him a “little martyr,” and such indeed he was for many long, tedious months.  On the 16th of February, the doctor came and spent two hours in carefully investigating his case.  He said it was a most trying condition of things, and he would gladly do something to relieve me, as he thought I had been through “enough to kill ten men.” ...  When Eddy was about eight months old, the doctor determined to discontinue the use of opiates.  He was now a fine, healthy baby, bright-eyed and beautiful, and his colic was reducing itself to certain seasons on each day, instead of occupying the whole day and night as heretofore.  We went through fire and water almost in trying to procure for him natural sleep.