THE RANDALL FAMILY
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��Anna's intimate friends were present, and especially those she had acquired while they were suffering afar from home from illnesses resembling her own. The last conversation we had together happened to be about you and Stanley, the night before. It will please you to know that, as it is unpleasant to have present even in the laying out of a body persons unfeeling and mechanical, the woman whom your father and I summoned, long after midnight, to come to the house when no hope of restoring life remained, re- marked that she would go any distance to perform a ser- vice on Anna's account, though she would have preferred any other. For it so happened that this poor woman had been robbed by burglars of 1^150, all she possessed ; which, being published in the paper, was seen by Anna, who called, and, having expressed the pleasure she should have felt if some stranger, having learned such a fact about her- self, should have called for the same object, put money in her hand, requesting that she might make up a little of the loss, and, finding that she had been used among other things to take in washing, procured her afterward all the business she could, which proved a great help ; and this leads me to say, etc. etc.
Acton, April 2gth. (Having engaged to return with Mrs. Adams, I continue from Acton.) This leads me to say that Anna's little charities, which generally took the most of her small income of five hundred dollars per annum (so that she would often, in her last quarter, be straightened for money), formed the chief pleasure of her life. Though often blamed by us for want of calculation and prudence, I do not know that one of us was in reality more economical of the means of pleasure. Where I bought prints, and others buy oyster suppers and fine clothes, she laid out her money in provisions and other
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