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  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.

  I dropped Sophia’s letter into the box immediately on taking yours out, else the tone of the former had been changed.

  I have no acquaintance with “Cleavelands First Lessons,” though I have peeped into his abridged grammar, which I should think very well calculated for beginners, at least, for such as would be likely to wear out one book, before they would be prepared for the abstruser parts of Grammar. Ahem! As no one can tell what was the Roman pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us, of the vowels, only a has a peculiar sound.

  In the end of a word of more than one syllable, it is sounded like ah—as pennah, Lydiah Hannah, &c. without regard to case.—but da is never sounded dah because it is a monosyllable.

  All terminations in es and plural cases in os, as you know, are pronounced long—as homines (hominēse) dominos (dominōse) or in English Johnny Vose. For information see Adam’s Latin Grammar—before the Rudiments This is all law and gospel to the eyes of the world—but remember I am speaking as it were, in the third person, and should sing quite a different tune, if it were I that made the quire. However one must occasionally hang his harp on the willows, and play on the Jew’s harp, in such a strange country as this.

  One of your young ladies wishes to study Mental Philosophy—hey? well tell her that she has the very best text book that I know of already in her possession. If she do not believe it, then she should have bespoken a better in another world, and not have expected to find one at “Little and Wilkins’.” But if she wishes to know how poor an apology for a Mental Philosophy men have tacked together, synthetically or analytically, in these latter days—how they have squeezed the infinite mind into a compass that would not nonpluss a surveyor of Eastern Lands—making Imagination and Memory to lie still in their respective apartments, like ink stand and wafers in a la[dy’s] escritoire—why let her read Locke or Stewart, or Brown. The fact is, Mental Philosophy is very like poverty—which, you know, begins at home; and, indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.

  Chorus. I should think an abridgment of one of the above authors, or of Abercrombie, would answer her purpose. It may set her a-thinking.

  Probably there are many systems in the market of which I am ignorant.

  As for themes—say first “Miscellaneous Thoughts”—set one up to a window to note what passes in the street, and make her comments thereon; or let her gaze in the fire, or into a corner where there is a spider’s web, and philosophize—moralize—theorize, or what not.

  What their hands find to putter about, or their minds to think about, — that let them write about. To say nothing of Advantages or disadvantages—of this, that, or the other. Let them set down their ideas at any given Season — preserving the chain of thought as complete as may be.

  This is the style pedagogical.

  I am much obliged to you for your piece of information. Knowing your dislike to a sentimental letter I remain

Yr affectionate brother,
H D T

  George Tatcher, having searched an hour in vain this morning to find a frog, caught a pickerel with a mullein leaf . . .

  7.30 P. M.—To Fair Haven Pond by boat, the moon four fifths full, not a cloud in the sky: paddling all the way . . . Home at ten.

  P.M.—Carried Sophia and Aunt up the Assabet.

The reflections of the bright-tinted maples very perfect. The common notes o£ the chickadee, so rarely heard for a long time . . .

  Looking up Trout Stream, it seems as a wild a place for a man to live as we had seen. What a difference between a residence there and within five minutes walk of the depot! What different men the two live must turn out!

  Now, methinks, the autumnal tints are brightest in our streets and in the woods generally. In the streets, the young sugar maples make the most show. The street is never more splendid . . .