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week. We had a letter from Mary today. Downing does not improve very rapidly. He is only able to sit up long enough to have his bed made. I am very much afraid he will be permanently injured.

Sunday Oct. 29 1882. It has been a misty day with occasional rain. I walked over to the cemetery after breakfast and it rained before I got back. Wrote to Mary to Lucy and to Prof. [[P?]] from whom I received a letter last night relative to the accounts on our trip. I have put away my summer clothes and looked over some of dear Gertrudes things in her bureau to see if the moths were getting among them. We are all so worried and unhappy about Maurice. How much unhappiness he has caused us for more than twenty years. The servants told us this morning that when they came from the post office at 9 o'clock last night he was lying on the settee on the back porch and Annie said this morning when she went to the room off the sitting room for something he was lying on the lounge, but he disappeared without any of us seeing him and has been away all day, in what wretchedness no one but himself knows. Now as I write I listen to every little noise expecting he will come home in some wretched plight. Sara wrote him last week that I had determined he should not come here anymore for my mothers care; which I greatly regret for I have never assumed the right to say so as long as his father is willing to shelter him. My father told me this fall I could do as I pleased about telling him to go away but I refused to do so, telling him that was for him to determine.

Monday 30 I do not remember a more exquisite day. A mellow golden time over all the landscape glorifying the commonest things. I went out directly after breakfast, over O Reillys farm and through the Wiltwyck cemetery to see the progress on the West Shore railroad. The embankment across Jacobs valley was nearly done and ready for a single track. I visited the site of the new depot on which they are at work and returning followed the mist clear down to the tunnel and the high bridge at the foundations of which they are at work having nearly completed the pier from which it starts in the South side of the creek. I came home along the cemetery and across the common. It seems to me I never before saw such richness and beauty of color and as I looked at the landscape, I had a feeling of melancholy and despair that I could not render its beauty and a sense of the vanity of trying to