Nov 6 - 41

My Dear Jimmie:

        I have just read in the Waco papers of the death of a lady, who as a girl, loved me more than has any one else since my young mother died when I was five months old.

        It was October, 1893, that I went as a boy teacher of 22 to Medina Co. to teach.

        It seems to me but yesterday, so bright is the image on my mind, that a little slip of a girl came shyly into my classroom, her books under her arm and took her seat at one of the desks.  Hear wealth of golden hair fell around her shoulders, her blue eyes sparkled with life & love.

        I had many grown girls in school in those days and some of them had to be reminded rather forcibly that love was not in the curriculum,  But not so with this little bundle of goodness & beauty.  I think it was a case of love at first sight.  My position rendered restraint necessary and she was too pure & too proud to show her feelings much.  Nevertheless we understood each other.  I can still feel the love thrill when our hands would touch in handling books & papers.  When school was out next year many happy hours we spent going to church & social affairs over the sand hills of that desolate region.

        But love was always with me a fickle & insubstantial feeling.  Before many months mine passed away.  Hers only deepened with time.

        I had an affair with another girl before her very eyes, which went as far as an engagement and then failed.  Covered with pain & humiliation I went to the University of Texas in the fall of 1895.  This girl & I wrote to each other all the two terms I was there.  I studied shorthand, about as difficult a subject as I ever tried.  So I would finish a few pages.  I would tear them out and send them to her to study.  She worked hard at it only as she afterwards told me, that she might not lose touch with me.

        I returned to the school in the summer of 1898.  She assisted me in school.  Our homes were close together and we were together nearly all the time except when she was in bed.  We studied Algebra together, and we really studied.

        All this time she showed me she loved me devotedly.  Indeed she told me so.  She said she had a vision of heaven in which I was standing at the right hand of God.

        She had no will, it seemed to me, but mine.  Her father warned me against my danger to her, and said I had better watch my step.  But she had so much faith in me that she knew I would protect her no matter what happened.  And our conduct was always within the bounds of propriety.

        That I did not love her she could not understand.  It was as impossible to her as of she had been told that 2 X 3 = 7 or 9.  She simply could not believe it.  I have seen the look of pain & incredulity on her beautiful face even when trying to comprehend it.

        She went in the fall of 1899 to Caldwell Co. to teach.  She realized at last that I as a life partner was impossible.  She married in the spring of 1900 a business man of considerable means, who, I have no doubt did better by her than I could ever have done.  She found after seven years of love which amounted almost to worship that her god had feet of clay.  Her memory will always be sacred to me.

        And, in these times especially, when the lamp of my own existence is burning low, when the pulse of life grows tremoulous & faint, ("I love to imagine that" crossed out) since she has gone to that spirit land which to her was so real as real as to your mother & mine.  I love to think that her beautiful spirit is still near me encouraging and consoling, that she knows that I was never to her intentionally false, that hers was the sweetest companionship I have ever known.

        This is a record.

        Of one that loved, not wisely but too well.

        Of one whose hand, like the bose Indian,

        Threw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe.

                    Your Uncle H (illegible, possibly Henry)