[It is by no means a luxury to be
despised, however, to have, in the American fashion, on a hot
summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up
like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then
snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Washington,
and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state
of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution
of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and
as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on
this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied
with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets,
and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very
tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country
has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers
in America are sometimes liable. God bless you, dearest H----.

I am, ever yours affectionately,
F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten
o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us
uttered six words.

BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833.
MY DEAREST H----,

You are the first to whom I date this new year.... I told you in
one of my letters to keep the five guineas Mrs. Norton has paid you
for my scribblements to pay the postage of my letters--do so....

We arrived in this place on Monday, at half-past four, having left
Philadelphia at six in the morning. We have just terminated a
second engagement there very successfully. If the roads and
carriages are bad, and the land-traveling altogether detestable,
the speed, facility, and convenience of the steamboats, by which
one may really be conveyed from one end to another of this world of
vast waters, are very admirable. Vast waters indeed they are! We
came down the Delaware on Monday, and (open your Irish eyes!)
sometimes it was six, sometimes thirteen miles wide, and never
narrower than three or four miles at any part of it that we saw. So
wide an expanse of