Sixty years passed away. One day I received a letter from one of my cousins, Louisa Train, who was living in Michigan. She told me that her father and mother had died, and that the furniture of the old house, in which they and her grandparents had lived, had fallen to her. "In moving an old bureau," she wrote, "it fell to pieces, and, to my surprise, two documents rolled upon the floor. These papers relate to you. One of them was a letter from your father to his mother, written from New Orleans shortly before you left that city. In it he says:
"'You can imagine my loneliness in being in this great house, always so lively, with eleven persons in it, including my own family--now all alone. George is with his tutor. He is a very extraordinary boy, though only four years old. The other day he repeated some verses, of which I can remember these lines:
"'I am monarch of all I survey; My right there is none to dispute; From the center all round to the sea, I am lord of the fowl and the brute.'"
I was to receive one other message from my father. Since I began writing this autobiography, my aged aunt, Abigail Pickering Frost, now in her ninetieth year, discovered a letter that my father had written to her and to her sister, my aunt Alice, who afterward married Henry A. Winslow, upon the day that he placed me on the ship Henry, and sent me to my grandmother at Waltham, Mass. Aunt Abigail, after the death of aunt Alice, who was one of the victims in the wreck of the Lexington, in January, '40, hid the letter in the garret of the old Waltham farmhouse, where she later discovered it. She now sends it to me from her home in Omaha, Neb., where it had again been lost, and found after a long search, as she knew that I would appreciate it as a part of my life-story.
The letter came to me as a wail from the dead. I was very young, and childish, and thoughtless when I parted from him forever; but his letter brought back to me in a flood the bitterness of our life in New Orleans, the loneliness of my father in his great grief, and made me suffer, nearly seventy years afterward, for the pain that I was then too young to understand or feel. I give this letter, which is inexpressibly dear to me, just as it was written.