[347] The gilded threat of this letter caused Mrs. Child to delay her departure until she should hear from the old hero himself. When his letter came, it prevented her journey.
John Brown's letter to Mrs. Child.
My dear Friend: (such you prove to be, though a stranger:) Your most kind letter has reached me, with the kind offer to come here and take care of me. Allow me to express my gratitude for your great sympathy, and at the same time to propose to you a different course, together with my reasons for wishing it. I should certainly be greatly pleased to become personally acquainted with one so gifted and so kind; but I cannot avoid seeing some objections to it, under present circumstances.
First, I am in charge of a most humane gentleman, who, with his family, have rendered me every possible attention I have desired, or that could be of the least advantage; and I am so far recovered from my wounds as no longer to require nursing.
Then, again, it would subject you to great personal inconvenience and heavy expense, without doing me any good.
Allow me to name to you another channel through which you may reach me with your sympathies much more effectually.
I have at home a wife and three young daughters — the youngest but little over five years old, the oldest nearly sixteen.
I have also two daughters-in-law, whose husbands have both fallen near me here.
There is also another widow, Mrs. Thompson, whose husband fell here.
Whether she is a mother or not I cannot say. All these, my wife included, live at North Elba, Essex County, New York.
I have a middle-aged son, who has been, in some degree, a cripple from his childhood, who would have as much as he could well do to earn a living.
He was a most dreadful sufferer in Kansas, and lost all he had laid up. He has not enough to clothe himself for the winter comfortably.
I have no living son, or son-in-law, who did not suffer terribly in Kansas.
Now, dear friend, would you not as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?
Will you also devote your own energies to induce others to join in giving a like amount, or any other amount, to constitute a little fund for the purpose named?
