
Since the receipt of your last letter to Dr Johnston, I cannot help thinking continually about you and
the—complicated disorders your letter reported. And so,—though
I have nothing else to write about,—I want to send you a line or two again to express my loving
sympathy with you and my best wishes. I hope that you are better than when you
wrote, & I am anxious to hear a better report.
After about a fortnight's frost, we have had today a heavy fall of snow. The young
moon shines brightly tonight, & it is again freezing. It seems likely that we shall have an
"old-fashioned" (frosty) Christmas.
The weather is very different to that in which Dr Johnston
visited you, and I try to imagine you—in these short, dark days—confined
to the room which Dr J's description & photographs have made so
familiar—solitary and ill—It reminds me of my mother's condition in her
last years—lame, suffering & much
alone—and my heart goes out to you like a son's.
But, as circumstances darkened, she herself only seemed to grow sweeter and more
loveable,—more
loving, tender & self-forgetting and her faith deeper and brighter. And I,
too, learned to love her more & more.
Day by day your influence is spreading, and new friends are learning to appreciate
and to love you, with grateful reverence, and a personal affection such as no one ever aroused
before.—I am deeply grateful that I, for one, am—privileged to write to
you, and to act as spokesman for an increasing multitude of others who are not so
privileged, but who, like myself, will think of you at this season with loving
good-will and tender sympathy. God bless you & all your household

