"In your next answer at least some of these questions. You see your mother has not lived twenty-seven years in New England without learning to ask questions."
These questions he had already answered in a letter which must have crossed his mother's.
On September 23, 1816, he writes from Windsor, Vermont:—
"I am still here but shall probably leave in a week or two. I long to get home, or, at least, as far on my way as Concord. I think I shall be tempted to stay a week or two there…. I do not like Windsor very much. It is a very dissipated place, and dissipation, too, of the lowest sort. There is very little gentleman's society."
WINDSOR, VERMONT, September 28, 1816.
I am still in this place…. I have written Lucretia on the subject of acquainting her parents, and I have no doubt she will assent…. I hear her spoken of in this part of the country as very celebrated, both for her beauty and, particularly, for her disposition; and this I have heard without there being the slightest suspicion of any attachment, or even acquaintance, between us. This augurs well most certainly. I know she is considered in Concord as the first girl in the place. (You know I always aimed highest.) The more I think of this attachment the more I think I shall not regret the haste (if it may be so called) of this proposed connection….
I am doing pretty well in this place, better than I expected; I have one more portrait to do before I leave it…. I should have business, I presume, to last me some weeks if I could stay, but I long to get home through Concord….
Mama's scheme of painting a large landscape and selling it to General Bradley for two hundred dollars, must give place to another which has just come into my head: that of sending to you for my great canvas and painting the quarrel at Dartmouth College, as large as life, with all the portraits of the trustees, overseers, officers of college, and students; and, if I finish it next week, to ask five thousand dollars for it and then come home in a coach and six and put Ned to the blush with his nineteen subscribers a day. Only think, $5000 a week is $260,000 a year, and, if I live ten years, I shall be worth $2,600,000; a very pretty fortune for this time of day. Is it not a grand scheme?
The remark concerning his brother Sidney Edwards's subscribers refers to a religious newspaper, the "Boston Recorder," founded and edited by him. It was one of the first of the many religious journals which, since that time, have multiplied all over the country.
Continuing his modestly successful progress, he writes next from Hanover, on October 3, 1816:—