Sunday, Oct 31, 1880 It rained all night and was still raining this morning but cleared shortly after breakfast. I went over to the cemetery and walked on the Common. There were fine solemn skies and rich deep shadows across the distances. I gathered a bouquet of dandelions, daisies, bugloss and the pale yellow snap dragon thinking all the while sadly of dear Gertrude and the many times we walked there together. I combated a melancholy sense of depression and tried to remember her constant injunction not to give way to discouragement and sadness. Reading one of my letters to her written from New York after she had been there to see the Taylors off I came across these almost prophetic words. "Somehow I feel that our life here is about to close and that radical changes are close upon us. I shudder at changes and wish life might go on without them.["] I did not know then that our life there had at that moment already closed. She never went there again. O if I and she had known it, how should we have borne it. But it was mercifully hidden from us. It would have been unutterable anguish to her. I had a letter from Mr. Leycester this morning. He had been in Scotland six weeks and just returned. His letter was a hurried one and he begged me to excuse it. Have written to Alice, to Mary Gifford, to Weir and to Wilmurt.
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