With respect to the confidential affair, everything is successful beyond my most sanguine expectations.  The more I know of her the more amiable she appears.  She is very beautiful and yet no coquetry; she is modest, quite to diffidence, and yet frank and open-hearted.  Wherever I have enquired concerning her I have invariably heard the same character of—­“remarkably amiable, modest, and of a sweet disposition.”  When you learn that this is the case I think you will not accuse me of being hasty in bringing the affair to a crisis.  I ventured to tell her my whole heart, and instead of obscure and ambiguous answers, which some would have given to tantalize and pain one, she frankly, but modestly and timidly, told me it was mutual.  Suffice it to say we are engaged.

If I know my parents I know they will be pleased with this amiable girl.  Unless I was confident of it, I should never have been so hasty.  I have not yet mentioned it to her parents; she requested me to defer it till next summer, or till I see her again, lest she should be thought hasty.  She is but sixteen and is willing to wait two or three years if it is for our mutual interest.

Never, never was a human being so blest as I am, and yet what an ungrateful wretch I have been.  Pray for me that I may have a grateful heart, for I deserve nothing but adversity, and yet have the most unbounded prosperity.

The father replies to this characteristic letter on September 4, 1816:—­

“I have just received yours of the 2d inst.  Its contents were deeply interesting to us, as you will readily suppose.  It accounts to us why you have made so long a stay at Concord....  So far as we can judge from your representations (which are all we have to judge from), we cannot refuse you our approbation, and we hope that the course, on which you have entered with your characteristic rapidity and decision, will be pursued and issue in a manner which will conduce to the happiness of all concerned....

“We think her parents should be made acquainted with the state of the business, as she is so young and the thing so important to them.”

The son answers this letter, from Walpole, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1816, thus naively:  “You think the parents of the young lady should be made acquainted with the state of the business.  I feel some degree of awkwardness as it respects that part of the affair; I don’t know the manner in which it ought to be done.  I wish you would have the goodness to write me immediately (at Walpole, to care of Thomas Bellows, Esq.) and inform me what I should say.  Might I communicate the information by writing?”

Here he gives a detailed account of the family, and, for the first time, mentions the young lady’s name—­Lucretia Pickering Walker—­and continues:—­