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                                                                                                                  Bangor Sat. July 13th 1839

Dear Mother

      I have not recieved a letter from you for a long time, at least it seems so to me; it was sometime last month I believe!. I want very much to know about how your health is now, and everything else that is happening.
  The "Examination" is to be three weeks from yesterday, the second day of August in the year 1839 I dont know whether there will be a school the next day or not. Now. What in the world is to be done? What can I do? I could get along, after a fashion, with the other things, I guess, but, there must be Declamation and Composition. I have been almost in an agony, all day since I heard of it, What shall I do? I have nothing at all to write about, and nothing to write about it!
I have had some notion of running away, and starting for home Wed. or Thursday preceeding the ? !

I dont know anything what to do for a Composition, and it is not a very desirable thing, for me at least, to get up on to the platform, to speak, with the room entirely numbered? with strangers, All looking at I!!!!!!!!!! There is just a fortnight from to day given to prepare coms' How would it work for me to move home about that time?! O! What is to be done? What? O! I expect if I could get clear up to the platform, that my knees would tremble so that I could not stand up, without holding on to the post! I am very well now, I believe I am a little fatter than I was a month or two ago. We have got through the 6th book in Virgil to the 7th and have just gone back to revise the whole, preparation for examination. What is to be done about my keeping on to third quarter? Dont Joe want to come too?