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Dear Mr Kendall,

           A severe snow-storm prevents my going to church today, so I will be for once, before-hand of my usually prompt husband, and for a novelty, commence a letter to you first. I am in haste to offer you my congratulations on an event which I trust will be fraught with much happiness to yourself, and also to her on whom your affections are placed. Pray that happiness be unalloyed and unending. I could not but rejoice at the intelligence, because I think you are one who will know how to appreciate the love of a devoted wife, and are so well fitted to receive and confer enjoyment in domestic life. May the blessing of Him from whom cometh all our good gifts, attend you in your new relations, and may life henceforth be gilded with a brightness hitherto unknown. I feel that you will not have extra vagant?, ill-founded notions to be painfully corrected by experience, but that your anticipations, having been reasonable, will be realized. Life is not all sunshine, and it is vain to expect that a universal law will be set aside in our case, but if its "rough ascent, its flowery slope" will both lead us to the "green fields and still water" of the heavenly world, the glorious prospect may well reconcile us to any difficulties or trials, with which infinite wisdom sees fit that we should contend. Life, to me, means a different aspect from what it did when I last saw you. Written a few days after Mr. H. wrote you, I was attached with a bilious fever (brought on, he thinks, by mismanagement and a suspension of cold water treatment) and, for a time I felt, that in all probability, death was close at hand. I could not tell you how much I then enjoyed Montgomery's beautiful hymn "Forever with the Lord". I value it now more than ever. I think your sentiments corresponded with my own respecting the ministrations of the departed. When it seemed that there was but a thin veil that separated