Letter 23
Date:
February 20, 1882
Sender:
Harmen Jan te Selle
Adressee:
Mevr. Dela ten Damme - te Selle
Derk Willem te Selle
Firth February 20,
1882
Much Respected Mother
and Brother with your Children. We let you know that we are all
in good health and we hope to hear the same from you. If this is
not so we would deeply regret it. Moreover, from your last letter
we know that you were well and healthy.
I think the letter you
wrote and the letter we wrote probably crossed in the mail,
because then you didn’t
write yet whether you got a letter or not.
As I do have some time
to write since it is stiff snowing and I couldn’t
do much outside after all I decided to write a letter to Holland
and I am rather sure another letter would be very welcome in
Holland. Over here also in this winter we were rather much
mailing. We ourselves did with the cold and the children with
whooping-cough. At Gerrit Jan’s
the youngest ones have had the whooping-cough too and they are not
yet down with it. Also at Jan Hendrik’s
three of the youngest ones are ill and we had one very sick: the
last but one, she had terrible lung fevers. But by now she is
better again. But there are many people still suffering. But there
are also rather many sudden deaths like happened last week. There
was one Dutch lady who had eaten dinner very well but by two o’clock
the next morning she was already dead. She had not been ill, she
had just complained a little about dizziness. That’s
what man is.
Except a few cold days
by now, the weather hasn' t been too bad for us till now. And as I
told you already we have snow today. It seems that winter is
coming at the wrong time of year but we can not complain because
it can change very fast. There are some farmers here who already
planted the wheat but some people thought it was too early to
plant.
I wrote you more than
one month ago and by this time you should have that letter. I
wrote you than about the grain prices and so on, but now they are
not that expensive. There must be some obstruction in trades
because some of the banks went bankrupt.
We hope things change
for the better and that there will be pretty soon the same brisk
trade in all merchandise. Please let me know if you still receive
those newspapers because I wrote the publisher and I haven't heard
back from him yet. So I don’t
know whether you get them or not. But if you don't get them then
you have to let me know, then I myself can send them to you
because I feel you might still want to read them.
