etc....  I like what I have read of Graham very much; the matter is very interesting, and the spirit in which it is treated; and I am deeply in love with Captain John Smith, and wonder greatly at Pocahontas marrying anybody else.  I suppose, however, the savage was not without excuse; for Mary Stuart, who knew something of these matters, says, with a rather satirical glance at her cousin of England, “En ces sortes de choses, la plus sage de nous toutes n’est qu’un peu moins sotte que les autres.”

I have been to my first rehearsal here to-day; the theater is small, but pretty enough.  The public has high pretensions to considerable critical judgment and literary and dramatic taste, and scouts the idea of being led by the opinion of New York....  It is rather tiresome that fools are cut upon the same pattern all the world over.  What is the profit of traveling?  Oh dear!  I think my Fazio has got St. Vitus’s dance!...

Yesterday I tried some horses, which were rather terrible quadrupeds.  They were not ill-bred cattle to look at, and I should think of a race that, with care and attention, might be brought to considerable perfection; but they are never properly broken for the saddle.  The Americans who have spoken to me about riding say that they do not like a horse to have what we consider proper paces, but prefer a shambling sort of half-trot, half-canter, which they judiciously call a rack, and which is the ugliest pace to behold, and the most difficult to endure, possible.  They never use a curb, but ride their horses upon the snaffle entirely, dragging it as tight as they can, and having the appearance of holding on for dear life by it; so that the horse, in addition to the awkward gait I have described, throws his head up, and pokes his nose out, and with open jaws “devours the road” before him....

I acted here last night for the first time.  Dall and my father say that I received my reception very ungraciously.  I am sure I am very sorry, I did not mean to do so, but I really had not the heart or the face to smile and look as pleased and pleasant as I can at a parcel of strangers....  I was not well, or in spirits, and laboring under a severe cold, which I acquired on board the steamboat that brought down the Delaware....  Neither the Raritan nor the Delaware struck me in any way except by their great width.  These vast streams naturally suggest the mighty resources which a country so watered presents to the commercial enterprise of its inhabitants.  The breadth of these great rivers dwarfs their shores and makes their banks appear flat and uninteresting, though the large lake-like basins into which they occasionally expand are grand from the mere extent and volume of the sweeping mass of waters.

The colors of the autumnal foliage are rich and beautiful beyond imagination—­crimson and gold, like a regal mantle, instead of the sad russet cloak of our fading woods.  I think, beautiful