Sept. 23, '78.—To-day we laid my dear Susan in the grave, my companion and counsellor for more than thirty years in all the joys and troubles of life. How patient and helpful and loving she was no one but I can know. With what truth and feeling her sister, Ellen Hall, says of her: "She was always so gracious a creature, so unaffectedly sweet good and loving, with a nature so simple and true that every one loved her." The affection and care of her children during her sickness was something of which I had no previous example. I saw nothing like it before in life, nor read in books, so constant, tender, and untiring.
I have lost the relish and enjoyment of life. Nothing interests me, my strength fails, and my appetite is gone. To arrange my affairs in the way most satisfactory for my children and to finish my book on '48 are the only objects for which I feel it possible to work.
In June, 1879, my friend of many years, Edward Butler died. When the news reached Europe his old comrade Cashel Hoey wrote me:—
Butler ought to have outlived us all. He was strong, sober, diligent, placid, prosperous. Why am I, who solemnly promised to relieve you all of the nuisance of my acquaintance twenty years ago, still cumbering the earth, and he underground? I thank you with all my heart for the note of his] which you enclosed me in your last letter, by which I know that he held me in such affectionate remembrance to the last. The day on which I heard of his death was one of those on which in the words of a Latin line that is often on my lips, mentem mortalia langunt. Thank God, that I can read between the lines of his letter to you, he was prepared to die, the one worthy object of all human genius and industry.
Another and still closer friend was lost to me at the same era—John Dillon, a stroke as tragic as the death of Davis.
While I was Chief Secretary Mrs. Hutton, the mother of the gifted girl who was to have been the bride of Thomas Davis, wrote to me about a translation of "Rinuccini's Nunciature " in Ireland, which she was about to publish. It had been partly translated by her daughter, and completed by herself. As no publisher would undertake the book on its own merits, it was published by subscription, and my help had been asked through Mr. D. R. Pigot. I replied that I would gladly co-operate. If the book reached me before I left Australia, I would undertake to sell fifty copies of it, and if it did not reach I would at all events engage a dozen of my colleagues and friends to become subscribers. Mrs. Hutton wrote:—
Your assistance is invaluable, and has given me great encouragement, and I am most grateful to you. I was much urged to bring it out, and now I thankfully consider it a memorial of my daughter and of him who suggested the translation and who was to have been my son.
