After speaking in the same letter of a man going to purchase implements in Baltimore, he says: “I think it would pay one capable of judging of such things, or one endowed with ‘Lockwood Common Sense,’” this allusion being to an imaginary manual which the children had attributed to their father. The quiet humor of the youthful farmer is manifested in another letter after this fashion: “I have been suffering all the week from the effects of a poison most probably communicated from some vine. It manifests itself pretty much as Job’s troubles showed themselves, and no position of body except standing affords relief. I haven’t yet got down into the ashes. If tartar emetic produced these eruptions, they might be attributed in some way to the evil agency of Mrs. W——.” The person here alluded to was the one who became notorious for the alleged poisoning of General W. S. Ketcham, in Baltimore. Young Lockwood had met her at a boarding-house in Annapolis after her release from prison, and was agreeably impressed by her conversation and manners. On a subsequent occasion, when visiting his family in Washington, and some severe remark had been made against the lady in question, he demanded that the company present should not abuse an absent friend in his presence. Being of a sensitive nature in regard to the weather, as is proved by several of his Annapolis letters, and by such passages as the one now to be quoted, it seems surprising that he should ever have decided to visit the icy regions of the North. “This gloomy weather,” he says, “is by no means calculated to elate one’s spirits, but, on the contrary, makes everything appear in its most dreary and desolate light, especially on a farm like this, and, though the spring will bring more work and attention, yet I shall hail its appearance with joy. I must confess that I can not prevent a feeling of loneliness from coming over me, particularly in the daytime, for at night my lamp and open wood-fire make things more cheerful, or rather less dreary.” As these letters were written from a farm, and by a mere boy, they are chiefly devoted to asking for advice as to how he should manage affairs, and to reporting the condition of the crops; but, in their way, they prove that there was much solid manhood in the lad, and that he looked upon life as something substantial, and not as a kind of dreamland. On one occasion, when visiting his home, he noticed that one of his sisters was manifesting what he thought an unreasonable excitement about the advent of cockroaches in the kitchen, whereupon he drew the figure of a vessel under full sail, beneath which he wrote the following: “The brig Anna Baby, bound to the north pole for a load of cockroaches.”