Martha often wrote to her parents, probably as shocked as they were by the conditions of black slavery, but she also at times had happier tidings to report. One letter told of the birth of her first child. In reply Richard sent his new granddaughter a hymn, of which both the words and music were of his own composition. Some years later he replied with a poem which, like most of his serious poetry, was deeply religious in tone and theme. Such, for instance, were the poems he gave Mary on each tenth anniversary of their wedding, and these two verses from the poem which he had presented to Martha on her twenty-first birthday:

Of Silver and gold I have none to bestow,
Houses and land, they belong not to me;
Nor high-sounding titles of honor I know,
Or freely, dear girl, I’d bequeath them to thee.

What Caleb bequeathed on his daughter be thine;[6] 
What flows from above and what springs from below;
The boon is from Heaven – Celestial – Divine,
What none but Jehovah the Lord can bestow.

In fact he did have a house – a large cottage, at least – and a small piece of land at Muddles Green but by no means was he rich. On the other hand, by the 1830s he had, perhaps, more silver and gold than his poems sometimes suggest, for his children were now growing off his hands. Some years before Joshua Quaife relieved him of all financial responsibility for Martha, she had begun to earn her own living by opening a school in East Hoathly, a neighbouring parish, and in 1830 Mark Antony joined her here for a month or so before moving to Cade Street, on the edge of Heathfield, where he too opened his own school. He lived during the week in a house opposite but came home at the weekends. Meanwhile Richard had trained Simon Peter to assist him at the Muddles Green school and Joseph to help him with his surveying and map-making affairs so that now only the two youngest children, Mary and Matthew Henry, were still at home dependent on their parents.