● ● ● mother’s death. He himself was moved to write a poem imagining the deathbed scene as the daughter sat beside her mother in “meek dispair”:
No agonising jesture, wild
With frantick raving, marks her grief;
But as a chastend, lovely child,
She prays that Heaven would grant relief.80
This he followed up with still another poem, written for the Republican and Argus, in reply to her lines in the Patriot. Assuring her that their mother heard her “sinless prayers of deep lament,” he went on to write of the joys of heaven which made all sorrow impossible, and held out hope that the daughter might there rejoin her mother before too long:
Then patience, Mary, a few years,
Or months, or weeks,—perhaps e’en days;
Endure each pain, subdue each fear,
The blessing’s yours—“Who Christ obeys.”81
While this doleful cheer was held out to her, Mrs. Glover had new cause for grief. Three weeks after Abigail Baker’s death, John Bartlett died in Sacramento. It may not have been a deep personal sorrow to her as the earlier loss had been, but at the very least it was the loss of a way out, at a moment when loneliness made her particularly vulnerable. Now she would have to search for another way, and the urgency of the need increased with every year.
Through all these years Mrs. Glover had struggled unsuccessfully against ill health. At the end of 1847 her mother had written George, “Mary has not been able to make her Bed since you [left] though she is ● ● ●