on a hot summer’s day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington, and Charleston.  The Southern States are at this moment in a state of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution of the Union.  The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied with and grateful for it.  Our houses are full, and eke our pockets, and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very tolerable discomfort.  But I believe the western part of the country has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers in America are sometimes liable.  God bless you, dearest H——.

I am, ever yours affectionately,
F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten
o’clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us
uttered six words.

BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833. 
MY DEAREST H——­,

You are the first to whom I date this new year....  I told you in
one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you
for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters—­do so....

We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left Philadelphia at six in the morning.  We have just terminated a second engagement there very successfully.  If the roads and carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable, the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of vast waters, are very admirable.  Vast waters indeed they are!  We came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!) sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw.  So wide an expanse of fresh running water is in itself a fine object.  We crossed the narrow neck of land between the Delaware and the Chesapeake on a railroad with one of Stephenson’s engines....

The railroad was full of knots and dots, and jolting and jumping and bumping and thumping places.  The carriages we were in held twelve people very uncomfortably.  Baltimore itself, as far as I have seen it, strikes me as a large, rambling, red-brick village on the outskirts of one of our manufacturing towns, Birmingham or Manchester.  It covers an immense extent of ground, but there are great gaps and vacancies in the middle of the streets, patches of gravely ground, parcels of meadow land, and large vacant spaces—­which will all, no doubt, be covered with buildings in good