University of Virginia Library

LETTER LXI.
In which 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.

[Note by the Editor. It will be recollected that the President
while in Boston, was for a few days seriously ill.]

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 want 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
rigiments 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 sawmill, and then
to ride about the city awhile in a fine painted covered
waggon 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. — If this aint enough to
tucker a feller out I dont know what is. The President
wouldn't have stood it till this time if he hadn't sent me
and Mr Van Buren and the rest of us to some of the
parties, while he staid to 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 one of the wads come
within six inches of making daylight shine through the
President.

Now I think ont, 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 pick-pockets. 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. — Now, my dear
old friend, isn't this too bad? What would you do if
you was in my case? I say again they are worse than
the pick-pockets. Isn't it Mr Shakespeare that says
something about `he that steals my munny-pus steals
trash, but he that steals my name ought to have his head
broke?' I wish you would find that story and print it.

There, the President's jest waked up, so I must subscribe
myself, in haste,