If we lose it, your mother and I have made up our minds to sit down contented with the loss.

I trust we shall be enabled to pay our honest debts without it and to support ourselves.
"As to you and your brothers, I trust, with your education, you will be able to maintain yourselves, and your parents, too, should they need it in their old age.

Probably this necessity laid on you for exertion, industry, and economy in early life will be better for you in the end than to be supported by your parents.

In nine cases out of ten those who begin the world with nothing are richer and more useful men in life than those who inherit a large estate....
"We have just heard from your brothers, who are well and in fine spirits.
Edwards writes that he thinks of staying in New Haven another year and of pursuing _general science_, and afterwards of purchasing a plantation and becoming a planter in some one of the Southern States!! Perhaps he intends to marry some rich planter's daughter and to get his plantation and negroes in that way.

This, I imagine, will be his only way to do it.
"The newspapers which I shall send with this will inform you of the state of our public affairs.