adopted home, and
paints its advantages in no uncertain colors:--

I am here unquestionably an exile but I will never dispond
at my fate nor whimper because my own folly, want of tact or
the very malice of the times have placed me in Patmos when I
desire a more splendid theatre. I can here be useful to my
family--to my district. I can live cheaply, increase my
fortune, be upon a par with the best of my neighbors, which
I prefer to the feasts of your ostentatious mayor or the
more real luxury of Phil Brasher's Table. Our population is
small, our society contracted, but we are growing rapidly in
numbers; and the society we have is in my opinion and to my
taste fully equal to anything in your home. We possess men
of intelligence without pretention, active men as Jacob
Barker without his roguery--men whom nature intended to
flourish at St. James, but whose fate fortune in some fit of
prolifick humor fixed and nailed to this Sinope. We have
however to mitigate the cold spring breezes of the lake a
fall unrivalled in mildness and in beauty even in Italy, the
land of poetry and passion. We have a whole lake in front,
whose clear blue waters are without a parallel in Europe. We
have a beautiful river brawling at our feet, the banks of
which gently slope and when our village is filled I will
venture to say that in point of beauty, health and variety
of prospect it has _nil simile aut secundum_.

Our house was the rendezvous of many of the learned and literary men of
the day, who would sit for hours in the library discussing congenial
topics. Among others I well recall the celebrated jurist, Ogden Hoffman.
He had an exceptionally melodious voice, and I have often heard him
called "the silver-tongued orator." It has been asserted that in
criminal cases a jury was rarely known to withstand his appeal. He
married for his second wife Virginia E. Southard, a daughter of Judge
Samuel L. Southard of New Jersey, who throughout Monroe's two
administrations was Secretary of War. In the "Wealthy Citizens of New
York," edited in 1845 by Moses Y. Beach, an early owner in part of _The
New York Sun_, the Hoffman family is thus described: "Few families, for
so few a number of persons as compose it, have cut 'a larger swath' or
'bigger figure' in the way of posts and preferment. Talent, and also
public service rendered, martial ga