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Head-Quarters Post of Nashville, Nashville, Tenn., February 28th 1865.

My dear friends Marian & Laura,

Your joint letter, dated the 21st instant reached me last night. You cannot guess how glad I was to get it: it seemed so strange and sad and unaccountable - the long wastes of silence that lay between us. Perhaps your letters to me have miscarried or are yet in transition, having been addressed to my Regt. instead of to this Post: perhaps they have been lost or destroyed in the perpetually recurrent R. R. accidents and mishaps on these military roads. It is most singular that mine should not have reached you: I cannot comprehend the mystery and fatality which seem to have enveloped us all of late. It was the more painful to me seeing that, during this long interval when no word of yours came to me, I needed your words of counsel and consolation more perhaps than I ever needed them before. - There are periods in my life - thank God they are not often recurrent - when from some hereditary taint, defect in brain or blood, spiritual flaw or what not, - my whole life is shrouded in a horror of great darkness, and I am beset with doubts and fears and black imaginings and temptings, such as I can hardly bear. Just as if my spirit was weighed upon by a mill-stone - a nightmare of the Soul - an utter abject dread and fear - a vast vague incomprehensible terror and haunting gloom. No one who has not himself