I have just received your very welcome reply. I am also happy to learn of your safe arrival home, and was much amused by your account of your voyage to Nantucket—also that you found an appreciative audience there.

 Your address me as Mr. Ricketson. What did I do while you were here to warrant so much deference—I pass for a rather aristocratic man among big folk, but didn’t suppose you knew it! You should have addressed “Dear Brooklawn.” Johnson in his Tour of the Hebrides says that they have a custom, in those isles, of giving their names to their chieftans or owners—as Col. Rasay, Much, etc., of which they are the Lairds. You are the true and only Laird of Walden, and as such I address you. You certainly can show a better title to Walden Manor than any other. It is just as we lawyers say, and you hold the fee. You didn’t think of finding such knowing folks this way, altho you had travelled a good deal in Concord.

  By the way, I have heard several sensible people speak well of your lecture before the New Bedford Lyceum, but conclude it was not generally understood.

  My son Arthur and I have begun a series of pilgrimages to old farmhouses—we don’t notice any short of a hundred years old.

  I am much obligated to you and your mother for your kind invitation. My intention is to attend the Anti-slavery meetings in Boston, Wednesday and Thurday, 24th and 25th this month, and shall endeavor to get up to Concord for part of a day.

  I have had a present of a jack-knife found upon a stick of timer in an old house, “built in” and supposed to have been left there by the carpenter. The house is over one hundred years old, and the knife is very curious.