XXVI
Being obliged on account of ill health to decline a visit to old friends, he wrote to them:
“I would like to see how Haverhill looks at this delightful season [October] and enjoy with old friends there the wonderful glory of the autumnal woods. But I find that I have to let a great many pleasant things drop out of my life. I thank God for such as remain, and, especially, for the love and goodwill of my friends, among whom I am glad to reckon the inmates of the F—— homestead. With love to thee and the Col. and C——, I include myself in Tiny Tim’s benediction, ‘God bless us every one!’”
“I went to the country for three or four weeks,” he said in 1885 in a letter to the writer, “and came back feeling better for it, but for the last three weeks have fallen back and the first hint of cold weather makes me dread the coming winter and feel that I have little assurance of another season of leaves and flowers. If I live a few weeks longer I shall be seventy-eight!”
It was that same year that he wrote again to his Haverhill friend in regard to the reunion of the surviving students of the Haverhill Academy in 1827-28.
“I thank thee for thy kind invitation,” he says, “but I have been so ill for the last week that I am quite unfit for going anywhere. I shall try to be at my old friend Wingate’s tomorrow, but I shall not venture to do anything more. It would give me no small pleasure to visit you, but I cannot do it. I hope there will be a very quiet meeting of the old scholars and nothing of a public nature. We don’t want to make a show of our old selves in the least. The thing is no plan of mine.”
A few years later he wrote to the same: