“You ask how the family have treated me.  They are all aware of the attachment between us, for I have made my attention so open and so marked that they all must have perceived it.  I know that Lucretia must have had some conversation with her mother on the subject, for she told me one day, when I asked her what her mother thought of my constant visits, that her mother said she ‘didn’t think I cared much about her,’ in a pleasant way.  All the family have been extremely polite and attentive to me; I received constant invitations to dinner and tea, indeed every encouragement was given me....

“I painted two hasty sketches of scenery in Concord.  I meet with no success in Walpole. Quacks have been before me.”

There is always a touch of quaint, dry humor in his mother’s letters in spite of their great seriousness, as witness the following extracts from a letter of September 9, 1816:—­

“We hope you will feel more than ever the absolute necessity laid upon you to procure for yourself and those you love a maintenance, as neither of you can subsist long upon air....  Remember it takes a great many hundred dollars to make and to keep the pot a-boiling.

“I wish to see the young lady who has captivated you so much.  I hope she loves religion, and that, if you and she form a connection for life, some five or six years hence, you may go hand in hand to that better world where they neither marry nor are given in marriage....

“You have not given us any satisfaction in respect to many things about the young lady which you ought to suppose we should be anxious to know.  All you have told us is that she is handsome and amiable.  These are good as far as they go, but there are a great many etcs., etcs., that we want to know.

“Is she acquainted with domestic affairs?  Does she respect and love religion?  How many brothers and sisters has she?  How old are they?  Is she healthy?  How old are her parents?  What will they be likely to do for her some years hence, say when she is twenty years old?

“In your next answer at least some of these questions.  You see your mother has not lived twenty-seven years in New England without learning to ask questions.”

These questions he had already answered in a letter which must have crossed his mother’s.

On September 23, 1816, he writes from Windsor, Vermont:—­

“I am still here but shall probably leave in a week or two.  I long to get home, or, at least, as far on my way as Concord.  I think I shall be tempted to stay a week or two there....  I do not like Windsor very much.  It is a very dissipated place, and dissipation, too, of the lowest sort.  There is very little gentleman’s society.”

WINDSOR, VERMONT, September 28, 1816.