A LOVE LETTER

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1533, 18 July 1901, Page 19

A LOVE LETTER

Great and famous as he became, loved and respected as he was in his home* Henry George did not occupy a pedestal in his own family. To his sons he was always a wise friend and a tender father. They liked to chum with him and h® with them—a fact which illuminates th® man’s character. To his Irish wife ho was ever the lover who had wooed her so impetuously in the far-off days in California (that Eldorado which yielded only the gold of pure love to them), and who had taken her for better,-for worse, with few “bits” in his pocket, and th® honeymoon a daily hustle for a job. I shall beg leave to quote here the little letter written over night for his wife to read on the morning of their marriage anniversary. It may well speak for itself:

“It is twenty-three years ago to-nighti since we first met—l only a month or two older than Harry, and you not much older than our Jen. For twentythree years we have been closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, and I think we esteeem each other more and love each other better than when we first began to love. You are now ‘fair, fat, and forty,’ and to me the mature woman is more handsome and more lovable than the slip of a girl whom twenty-three years ago I met, without knowing that my life was to be bound up with hers.. We ar© not- rich—so poor just now, in fact, that all I can give you on this anniversary is a little love letter; but there is no one that we can afford to envy, and in each other’s love we have what no wealth could compensate for. For twenty-three years you have been mine and I have been yours; and, though twenty-three years your husband, I am more than ever your lover.”