42. LETTER XLII.[1]
MAJOR DOWNING DESCRIBES THE VISIT OF THE PRESIDENT AT BOSTON,
AND ALSO COMPLAINS OF THE RASCALLY COUNTERFEITERS THAT
WRITE LETTERS IN HIS NAME FOR THE NEWSPAPERS.
Boston, Tuesday, June 25, 1833.
To the Editor of the Portland Courier.
My Dear Old Friend:—I'm keeping house with the President
to-day, and bein' he's getting considerable better, I
thought I'd catch a chance when he was taking a knap, and
write a little to let you know how we get along. This ere
sickness of the President has been a bad pull-back to us. He
hasn't been able to go out since Sunday afternoon, and I've
been watchin' with him this two nights, and if I wasn't as
tough as a halter, I should be half dead by this time.
And if the President wan't tougher than a catamount, he'd
kick the bucket before he'd been round to see one half the
notions there is in Boston. Poor man, he has a hard time of
it; you've no idea how much he has to go through. It's worse
than being dragged through forty knot-holes.
To be bamboozled about from four o'clock in the morning
till midnight, rain or shine—jammed into one great house to
eat a breakfast, and into another great house to eat a
dinner, and into another to eat supper, and into two or three
others between meals, to eat cooliations, and to have to
go out and review three or four regiments of troops, and then
to be jammed into Funnel Hall two hours, and shake hands
with three or four thousand folks, and then to go into the
State House and stand there two or three hours, and see all
Boston streaming through it like a river through a saw-mill,
and then to ride about the city awile in a fine painted covered
wagon, with four or five horses to draw it, and then ride
awhile in one without any cover to it, finney-fined off to the
top notch, and then get on to the horses and ride awhile a
horseback, and then run into a great picture-room and see
more fine pictures than you could shake a stick at in a week,
and then go into some grand gentleman's house, and shake
hands a half an hour with a flock of ladies, and then after supper
go and have a little still kind of a hubbub all alone with
three or four hundred particular friends, and talk an hour or
two, and take another cooliation, and then go home, and about
midnight get ready to go to bed, and up again at four o'clock
the next morning and at it. And if this aint enough to tucker
a feller out, I don't know what is. The President wouldn't
have stood it till this time, if he hadn't sent me and Mr. Van
Buren to some of the parties, while he staid at home to rest
The President's got so much better, I think we shall be able
to start for Salem to-morrow, for we must go through with it
now we've begun, as hard work as 'tis. I think we shall get to
Portland about the 4th of July; so, if you get your guns and
things all ready, you can kill two birds with one stone. I hope
you'll be pretty careful there how you point your guns. They
pointed 'em so careless at New York that a wad come within
six inches of making daylight shine through the President.
Now I think on't, there is the most rascally set of fellers
skulking about somewhere in this part of the country that
ever I heard of, and I wish you would blow 'em up. They are
worse than the pickpockets. I mean them are fellers that's
got to writing letters and putting my name to 'em, and sending
of 'em to the printers. And I heard there was one sassy
feller last Saturday, down to Newburyport, that got on to a
horse, and rid about town calling himself Major Jack Downing,
and all the soldiers and the folks marched up and shook
hands with him, and thought it was me. Isn't it Mr. Shakespeare
that says something about “he that steals my munnypus
steals trash, but he that steals my name ought to have his
head broke?” I wish you would find that story and print it.
Your old friend,
MAJOR JACK DOWNING.
[1]
Editorial Note.—It will be recollected that the President, while in Boston,
was for a few days seriously ill.
