FAMILY AFFECTION 157 
wherever he and you all live, should circumstances favour 
my living at home on my return, there I shall be happy to 
find you, though now no spot is dearer to me than Invereck ; 
two sketches of it hang in my cabin. 
The best anodyne, however, was hard work and busy occu- 
pation : so that he writes to his father on September 7th : 
Still I have been very happy here, and never before could 
I have so deeply felt how much the study of our mutual 
pursuit tends to alleviate our distress. 
The uncertainty made him * afraid to mention names of 
those so far off and in such precarious health.' But warned 
of Mary's decline, and eagerly following the successive hopes 
and fears for so dear a life, he schooled himself to meet the 
inevitable, and the pathetic accounts of the child's last 
months found him prepared as much as might be to accept 
his own irremediable loss with the resignation to the will of 
an inscrutable Providence that was an integral part of his 
parents' faith. Still, resignation involved a sharp struggle 
with feeling, and as he drew near the Falklands after the second 
voyage to the ice, he wrote to his father (April 5, 1842 ; the 
words are quoted from a copy only) : 
Much as I long for tidings of you all, I cannot but feel 
sure that they must be woeful ; and to own the truth, one 
of my reasons for beginning this letter before we cast anchor 
is that I may be able to communicate to you some of the 
cheerfulness I now feel, and that my letter shall not be 
tinged with that sorrow and moroseness which I fear may 
have characterised some of my former epistles : these were 
written on the spur of the moment, when to my shame 
present griefs obliterated the recollection of past mercies, 
and whilst pining over what had occurred, I had forgotten 
how much I of all others had to be thankful for, and how 
little it was my duty to trouble you with such complaints. 
Whatever the tidings may prove to be, I have too long 
suffered from hope delayed and been kindly by you all too 
well prepared, ever to feel again the poignant anguish with 
which I received the first letters that awaited me at Van 
Diemen's Land. 
