BLACKDEEP FEN, 24_th_ _November_ 1838.
MY DEAR ESTHER,—This is your birthday and your wedding-day, and I have
sent you a cake and a knitted cross-over, both of which I have made
myself. I can still knit, although my eyes fail a bit. I hope the
cross-over will be useful during the winter. Tell me, my dear, how you
are. Twenty-eight years ago it is since you came into the world. It was
a dark day with a cold drizzling rain, but at eleven o’clock at night you
were born, and the next morning was bright with beautiful sunshine. Some
people think that Blackdeep must always be dreary at this time of year,
but they are wrong. I love the Fen country. It is my own country. This
house, as you know, has belonged to your father’s forefathers for two
hundred years or more, and my father’s old house has been in our family
nearly as long. I could not live in London; but I ought not to talk in
this way, for I hold it to be wrong to set anybody against what he has to
do. Your brother Jim is the best of sons. He sits with me in the
evening and reads the paper to me. He goes over to Ely market every
week. He has his dinner at the ordinary, where many of the company drink
more than is good for them, but never once has he come home the worse for
liquor. I had a rare fright a little while ago. I thought there was
something between him and one of those Stanton girls at Ely. I saw she
was trying to catch him. It is all off now. She is a town girl,
stuck-up, spends a lot of money on her clothes, and would have been no
wife for Jim. She would not have been able to put her hand to anything
here. She might have broken my heart, for she would have tried to draw
Jim away from me. I don’t believe, my dearest child, in wedded love
which lessens the love for father and mother. When you were going to be
married what agony I went through! It was so wicked of me, for it was
jealousy with no cause. I thank God you love me as much as ever. I wish
I could see you again at Homerton, but the journey made me so ill last
winter that I dare not venture just yet.—Your loving mother,