smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father’s European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the noblest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott’s feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board ship?  Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel.  Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation.  I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure....  Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable scrap of paper!...  Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen.  The food we get here in New York is very indifferent.  It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th.  This is my birthday—­in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us.  I am to-day three-and-twenty.  Where is my life gone to?  As the child said, “Where does the light go when the candle is out?” ...  Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such noble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.

This is our last night but one of acting here.  We play “The Hunchback” on Saturday, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Washington, and then return here.  I must go now and rehearse Katharine and Petruchio.

I have just finished Graham’s “History,” and am beginning John Smith.  By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith.  Come out and see it, won’t you?  Good-by, dear.  Think always of your affectionate

F. A. K.

December 9, 1832. 
MY DEAREST H——­,

I received yours of October 16th yesterday....  You are not healthily natured enough to be inconstant.  Yours is one of those morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse....  I am delighted that you are going to Scotland