... We reached home safely Thursday night after a dusty ride and
tiresome. It is very lonesome in the house. I think we both miss you now
more than we did before we left home; it is now a certainty that you
are fixed there in Harvard and that a wide gulf separates us. But if
you will only keep well and prosper in your studies we shall endure the
separation cheerfully. Children have but little idea how the hearts of
their parents yearn over them. When they grow up and have children of
their own, then they understand and sigh, and sigh when it is too late.
If you live to be old you will never forget how your father and mother
came to visit you at Harvard and tried so hard to do something for you.
When I was your age and was at school at Ashland, father and mother
came one afternoon in a sleigh and spent a couple of hours with me.
They brought me some mince pies and apples. The plain old farmer and his
plain old wife, how awkward and curious they looked amid the throng of
young people, but how precious the thought and the memory of them is to
me! Later in the winter Hiram and Wilson came each in a cutter with a
girl and stayed an hour or so.... The world looks lovely but sad, sad.
Write us often.
Your affectionate father, J. B.
"When it is too late"--how he understood, how broad were his sympathies!
What anguish those words must cost all of us at some time! Father
understood, I did not--and now it is too late.
West Park, N. Y., Nov. 7, 1897.