Jacksonville, Fla.,
March 11, 1864.
Dear Sister L.:—
Somebody has said that is the sweetest word of endearment in the language, and I believe it. Beside it other terms seem to me in my present mood mawkish and sentimental. Since that April day when the red dawn of this cruel war was just breaking over our country, and with tear-wet face you bade me good-bye and God speed, no other woman has been so dear to me. Perhaps my letters and my language may not have shown it, but it is true. There may be a touch of Lara or Conrad the Corsair in my character. I know my heart is not often visible in my face, but when I came home and you were so glad to see me that you could not think even where your husband was, do not imagine that because I was not affected in the same way, or that there were no tears of joy in my eyes, I did not feel one of the greatest joys of my life that day.
H. has never seemed to me like you. Perhaps the greater difference in our ages may account for this, and she is so shy and strange, she is really getting to be almost a stranger. She has changed very much since I left home, and I have not kept pace with the changes, so infrequent have been her letters, and her letters, too, are not a part of or like herself. They are only the family gossip, but you, in all this time of absence have been my dear sister, and, when sitting round the camp fire a comrade has spoken of his sister, I have mentioned mine with reverent love and tenderness. And often I have thought but not spoken of how she has followed me in her thoughts and dreams, mayhap, over weary roads and through the smoke and din of battle, or in the tiresome hours of winter quarters followed me with the untold wealth of a sister’s love.
Often I have thought and felt I was not worthy of all that wealth of sisterly pride and affection lavished on me, but, because I was not worthy, I have craved it all the more. Brothers are not like a sister. Perhaps I may be wanting in natural affection, but my younger brothers never seemed so very dear to me. At home I used to be impatient of their restless freaks, and though I would have resented very quickly a wrong done to them by an outsider, yet I never troubled myself much about them. E. is getting to be a man, and, as his strength and manhood develop, my admiration for him increases. In fact, to see our letters, you would think we constitute a mutual admiration society, but E. is not a woman and not my sister. And as a proof of my love for you, have I not written you often? And how anxiously I have watched the mails for your letters, you will never know.
