I was much pleased with your lively and life-like account of your voyage. You were more than repaid for your trouble, after all. The coast of Nova-Scotia which you sailed along from Windsor westward is particularly interesting to the historian of this country, having been settled earlier than Plymouth. Your “Isle of Haut” is properly “Isle Haute” or the High Island of Champlain’s map. There is another off the coast of Maine. By the way, the American elk, of American authors, (Cervus Canadensis) is a distinct animal from the moose (cervus alces), though the latter is also called elk by many.

  You drew a very vivid portrait of the Australian—short & stout, with a pipe in his mouth, and his book inspired by beer, Pot 1st, Pot 2 &c. I suspect that he must be pot-bellied withal. Methinks I see the smoke going up from him as from a cottage on the moor. If he does not quench his genius with his beer, it may burst into a clear flame at last. However, perhaps he intentionally adopts the low style.

  What do you mean by that ado about smoking and my “purer tastes”? I should like his pipe as well as his beer, at least. Neither of them is so bad as to be “highly connected,” which you say he is, unfortunately. Did you ever see an English traveller who was not? Even they who swing for their crimes may boast at last that they are highly connected.—No! I expect nothing but pleasure in “smoke from your pipe.”

  You & the Australian must have put your heads together when you concocted those titles—with pipes in your mouths over a pot of beer. I suppose that your chapters are Whiff the 1st—Whiff the 2nd &c But of course it is a more modest expression for “Fire from my Genius.”

  You must have been very busy since you came back, or before you sailed, to have brought out your History, of whose publication I had not heard. I suppose that I have read it in The Mercury. Yet I am curious to see how it looks in a volume, with your name on the title page.

  I am more curious still about the poems. Pray put some sketches into the book—your shanty for frontispiece; Arthur & Walton’s boat, (if you can) running for Cuttyhunk in a tremendous gale, not forgetting “Be honest boys” &c nearby; the Middleboro Ponds with a certain island looming in the distance; the Quaker meetinghouse, and the Brady House, if you like; the villagers catching smelts with dip nets in the twilight, at the head of the River &c &c. Let it be a local and villageous book as much as possible. Let some one make a characteristic selection of mottoes from your shanty walls, and sprinkle them in an irregular manner, at all angles, over the fly leaves and margins, as a man stamps his name in a hurry; and also canes, pipes, and jacknives, of all your patterns, about the frontispiece. I can think of plenty of devices for tail-pieces. Indeed I should like to see a hair-pillow, accurately drawn, for one; a cat with a bell on, for another; the old horse with his age printed in the hollow of his back; half a cocoa-nut shell by a spring; a sheet of blotted paper; a settle occupied by a settler at full length, &c &c &c. Call all the arts to your aid. Dont wait for the Indian Summer, but bring it with you

  Yrs, truly
  H. D. T.

  P.S. Let me ask a favor. I am trying to write something about the autumnal tints, and I wish to know how much our trees differ from English & European ones in this respect. Will you observe, or learn of me what English or European trees, if any, still retain their leaves in Mr. [James] Arnold’s garden (the gardener will supply the true names) & also if the foliages of any (& what) European or foreign trees there have been brilliant the past month. If you will do this, you will greatly oblige me. I return the newspaper with this.