My kind Friend & Relative,

It has been my wish to write you, but Mr. Powell and Aunt Lucy are so regular in their correspondence, and your infirmities making the necessity of answering, somewhat burdensome, have prevented my doing so, as often as my kindly feeling would dictate, you need not trouble yourself to answer mine, being only letters of grateful friendship, I will take it for granted, the good wishes are all reciprocated, and as I hear from you through Mr. Powell, that will suffice.

My anxieties have been great for the last month relative to my son and his family, he being on duty in Richmond, and his wife and children at Ashland (their present home) unprotected and exposed the insults and injuries which Sheridan's raiders might inflict. I saw from the Papers they had been there, and repulsed, but more I could not hear, until a few days since, our tardy and irregular mail brought me a letter from John, whose silence was owing to his having been very sick from exposure to the hot suns and trying exercise of the Citizen soldier. The raiders had ordered all the women and children to vacate the houses as they would be shelled, and ere the words were out of the lips of the vandal, balls and bombs and bullets blazed and [unclear: passed] right over and through the house in which my daughter and her children were -- with great presence of mind she took her babe in her arms, and told the others to be down flat on the floor. The crash and crack of the balls and bullets were terrific and constant, her little babe 10 months old, laid as still by her side, as if he were dead, and God looked down on that scene of danger, and distress, and not one of them was harmed. Nora, about 10 years old in her fright, attempted to run out of the house, and a minnie ball tore the front of her dress entirely across, but did not touch her dear flesh, this is the third time that the house in which they has been shelled, twice in Williamsburg, and yet they live, the monuments of God's mercy -- Oh! That He would lift his arms of power, and deliver us from their presence and their outrages. The time is at hand, I hope you believe.

I have lately returned from a pleasant visit to Columbus, and to your son's Estates. It was a melancholy pleasure to visit the last, and I was so warmly welcomed by the servants that I am glad I went, I shall write to Mrs. Cocke, and give her a particular account of every thing I saw. It would be gratifying, no doubt. "Good, very good" might be written of the Property in very department, so far as I could see or enquire into, and I did this not from curiosity, but interest.

Dear friend, your name is a household word in many families about Columbus, as well as here, the dwellers on the roadside from here to that place, all enquire after you and wherever I go, I am asked about your health -- it is pleasant to know that our friends do not forget us, and on this place, if you were here in bodily presence, you would scarcely be more frequently mentioned, or [illegible] happier influence over your people. May God bless and preserve you, and give you health yet longer to be useful, is the constant prayers of your attached relative --

Juliana Dorsey

I wish you could see Hopewell in the light of this glorious summer morning, the yard so green, the trees so beautiful, the birds as merry, everything glad and happy. You do not see it to advantage in Winter-