I don’t know whether you will care for all these results of my observations, but your mention of America and wish to see it drew them out.
As to politics, I knew very little about them before I came, and had a faint sort of prejudice in favour of the South, believing the North to be very insincere about slavery, etc. I now think that the Anti-slavery cry has been used most shamelessly for private and political ends by some, but that there is at the heart of Yankeedom a strong true heart beating earnestly in favour of liberty for negroes as well as whites, and that there are and have been very many most sincerely bent on very unselfish ends, and a great deal of real patriotism (on both sides probably) evolved by the war.
I am chiefly with some of the very best of the Anti-slavery people. The Sewalls used to shelter escaped negroes when to do so was a penal offence.
I saw Lecky’s Rationalism (which ought rather to be called the History of Reasonableness) before I left England, but only read part of it. I first found it on Miss Cobbe’s table, and liked it very much. I don’t know of any great American books lately,—they pirate almost everything English.
I think the English here must be feeling pretty badly about Jamaican affairs,—I am. They say the French troops are certainly to evacuate Mexico now....
I hope Hetty got thanked for her note a little while ago,—this letter is meant as much for her as for you, though I forgot to begin it so. Love to the bairns. I suppose I shall scarcely know them when I get back.
Your aff. sister,
S. L. J.-B.”
CHAPTER XIV
QUESTIONINGS
When S. J.-B. left England her plan had been to spend at least part of the winter with an old school-friend, now married to the Revd. Addington Venables—afterwards Bishop—of Nassau in the West Indies; but life in Boston proved too attractive. She liked the women doctors and they liked her; possibly they had designs on her; in any case Dr. Sewall was anxious to get her health up to such a level as would make professional life a possibility; and, for the furtherance of this end, it was arranged that she should share the resident’s little house in connection with the hospital. Miss Isabel Bain had gone to pursue her education in one of the good girls’ schools. Already in October one had heard of S. J.-B. “helping the doctor through oceans of figures in hospital reports,” and one can well believe that she was an efficient member of the little community. The very day after she took up her residence in the hospital precincts the “student” who did the dispensing was summoned away, and as—of course!—there was a run of arduous cases at the same time, S. J.-B. cheerfully volunteered to do the dispensing,—“and was very thankfully accepted” to fill the gap! Within a week she writes to her Mother: