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snob [Henry] Surtees, in a comfortablish upper room, and presently Mrs Mason appeared. The former Jane Gibson looks plump, good humored, and pleasant. I got very little fragments of news from them. Alfred Brown or Albert (I think the latter) is said to be married, at Troy. Mr [Moses] and Mrs [Rebecca] Morse (nee Kidder) are as I knew at Poughkeepsie. Of Lotty [Kidder] little is known, (and [Arthur] Mason said he didn’t want to know. There are rumors of her being companion of a lady in Canada, seen in New York, flitting hither and thither — that’s all. Her mother know naught of her. Walked back through the moonlight streets all hideous with barricades of dirty ice, with strange thoughts in my head about this awful mystery of Existence. And like Homer’s Bellerophon I seem to be out of all sympathy with others, — devouring my own heart. Very bitter food too. I seem to have reached a strange stationary point in my existence, but see every thing through a most ghastly medium. I fancy this great world spinning on remorselessly through systems of worlds, the miseries, hopes, anxieties — the finite nothings — I felt like the Wandering Jew. I tried to think of the words “Ye are of more value than many sparrows” but they fell coldly, improfitably on me. Oh God, that I could believe and hope more. Dear God to believe and pray like Hannah [Bennett]!

21. Thursday. Writing letters, being incapable of aught else, and doing that with difficulty, to [Joseph] Greatbatch