put them down for the
first time. I feel, in the best aspects of this welcome, something of
the presence and influence of that spirit which directs my life, and
through a heavy sorrow has pointed upwards with unchanging finger for
more than four years past. And if I know my heart, not twenty times this
praise would move me to an act of folly.". . .

There were but two days more before the post left for England, and the
close of this part of his letter sketched the engagements that awaited
him on leaving Boston: "We leave here next Saturday. We go to a place
called Worcester, about 75 miles off, to the house of the governor of
this place; and stay with him all Sunday. On Monday we go on by railroad
about 50 miles further to a town called Springfield, where I am met by a
'reception committee' from Hartford 20 miles further, and carried on by
the multitude: I am sure I don't know how, but I shouldn't wonder if
they appear with a triumphal car. On Wednesday I have a public dinner
there. On Friday I shall be obliged to present myself in public again,
at a place called New Haven, about 30 miles further. On Saturday
evening I hope to be at New York; and there I shall stay ten days or a
fortnight. You will suppose that I have enough to do. I am sitting for a
portrait and for a bust. I have the correspondence of a secretary of
state, and the engagements of a fashionable physician. I have a
secretary whom I take on with me. He is a young man of the name of Q.;
was strongly recommended to me; is most modest, obliging, silent, and
willing; and does his work _well_. He boards and lodges at my expense
when we travel; and his salary is ten dollars per month--about two
pounds five of our English money. There will be dinners and balls at
Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and I believe everywhere. In
Canada, I have promised to _play_ at the theatre with the officers, for
the benefit of a charity. We are already weary, at times, past all
expression; and I finish this by means of a pious fraud. We were engaged
to a party, and have written to say we are both desperately ill. . . .
'Well,' I can fancy you saying, 'but about his impressions of Boston and
the Americans?'--Of the latter, I will not say a word until I have seen
more of them, and have gone into the interior. I will only say, now,
that we have never yet been required to dine at a table-d'hote; that,
thus far, our rooms are as much our own here as they would be at the
Clarendon