Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters

Dear Ellen, Page 020

Dear Ellen not quite so deep an experience in the realities, as some of my friends but I suppose it will all come along in time and plenty fast enough I very much like your plan of my visiting Salt Lake this summer hut fear it is hardly practicable; there is nothing in the world that would afford me more pleasure than to revisit the scenes of so many pleasant recollections and in the Lord's own due time I shall I feel to sympathize deeply with you in your great loss in losing your only surviving parent Oh! I hope and pray that is a trial I may never be called on to endure; but still it is almost as bad to have him gone so much as mine is. He has left us again and gone to the Islands it seems so lonely and desolate when he is gone away it seems sometimes almost as if I never had a father he has been from home so much we expect him back in a year I hope we may not be disappointed. Frances' health is about the same as usual she is lively, and spry as ever, but not strong she does not look much like the Frances of olden times you know she used to be very fleshy June sd Dear Ellen again I resume my pen to finish my somewhat neglected epistle. Since I commenced this I have changed my name would you believe it? I can hardly convince myself of it but I suppose it is so. John Eldridge1 was here on his way home from Australia so we thought we would have it over while he was here, he was all the one present beside the relations, nobody heard a word of it for a week and when they did you never saw such a surprised set of folks as there were there. We are going to have the wedding a year after date which was the twenty sixth of May I shall know 'John S. Eldredgc, born 1831, came to Utah in the 1847 pioneer company and undertook a mission to Australia, 1852-56; died 1873. Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City; Andrew Jenson History Company, 1936), 4:700. Deseret News (Salt Lake City), July 2, 1856. 20