Again, May 10th, she writes: 

It would be a great pleasure to me to keep a journal for you if I were well enough, but I am not.  I have my sick headache now once a week, and it makes me really ill for about three days.  Towards night of the third day I begin to brighten up and to eat a morsel, but hardly recover my strength before I have another pull-down, just as I had got to this point the door-bell rang, and lo! a beautiful May-basket hanging on the latch for “Annie,” full of pretty and good things.  I can hardly wait till morning to see how her eyes will shine and her little feet fly when she sees it.  George has been greatly distressed about S. S., and has, I think, very little, if any, hope that he will recover.  Dr. Tappan [10] spent Tuesday night here.  We had a really delightful visit from him.  He spoke highly of your classmate, Craig, who is just going to be married.  He told us a number of pleasant anecdotes about father.  Eddy has got big enough to walk in the street.  He looks like a little picture, with his great forehead and bright eyes.  He is in every way as large as most children are at two years.  His supreme delight is to tease A. by making believe strike her or in some other real boy’s hateful way.  She and he play together on the grass-plat, and I feel quite matronly as I sit watching them with their balls and wheel-barrows and whatnots.  This little scamp has, I fear, broken my constitution to pieces.  It makes me crawl all over when I think of you three fagging all day at such dull and unprofitable labor.  But I am sure Providence will do what is really best for you all.  We think and talk of and pray for you every day and more than once a day, and, in all my ill-health and sufferings, the remembrance of you is pleasant and in great measure refreshing.  I depend more upon hearing from you all than I can describe.  What an unconquerable thing family affection is!

She thus writes, May 30th, to her old Portland friend, Miss Lord: 

I have written very few letters and not a line of anything else the past winter, owing to the confusion my mind is in most of the time from distress in my head.  Three days out of every seven I am as sick as I well can be—­the rest of the time languid, feeble, and exhausted by frequent faint turns, so that I can’t do the smallest thing in my family.  I hardly know what it is so much as to put a clean apron on to one of my children.  To me this is a constant pain and weariness; for our expense in the way of servants is greater than we can afford and everything is going to destruction under my face and eyes, while I dare not lift a finger to remedy it.  I live in constant alternations of hope and despondency about my health.  Whenever I feel a little better, as I do to-day, I am sanguine and cheerful, but the next ill-turn depresses me exceedingly.  I don’t think there is any special danger of my dying, but there is a good deal of my getting run down beyond the power of recovery, and of dragging out that useless existence of which I have a perfect horror.  But I would not have you think I am not happy; for I can truly say that I am, most of the time, as happy as I believe one can be in this world.  All my trials and sufferings shut me up to the one great Source of peace, and I know there has been need of every one of them.