As the season advanced, Jackson began to enjoy his autumn picnic on the heath of Washington. He had an eye for the details which gave interest to travel. “I put up a covey of partridge,” he wrote October 7, “about three hundred yards from the House of Congress, yclept the Capitol.” He had the merit of being first to discover what few men of his time had the taste to feel,--that Washington was beautiful:-- “I have procured two very good saddle-horses, and Elizabeth and I have been riding in all directions round this place whenever the weather has been cool enough. The country has a beautifully picturesque appearance, and I have nowhere seen finer scenery than is composed by the Potomac and the woods and hills about it; yet it has a wild and desolate air from being so scantily and rudely cultivated, and from the want of population.... So you see we are not fallen into a wilderness,--so far from it that I am surprised no one should before have mentioned the great beauty of the neighborhood. The natives trouble themselves but little about it; their thoughts are chiefly of tobacco, flour, shingles, and the news of the day. The Merrys, I suppose, never got a mile out of Washington, except on their way to Philadelphia.” Part of Jackson’s leisure was employed in reading Erskine’s correspondence, although he would have done better had he neglected this customary duty, and had he brought to his diplomacy no more prejudices than such as belonged to his nature and training. His disgust with Erskine only added to his antipathy for Erskine’s objects, methods, and friends. “My visitors,” he wrote, “are a different set from Erskine’s, I perceive; many of them he says he never saw. Per contra, many of the Democrats who were his intimates never come to me, and I am well pleased and somewhat flattered by the distinction.... Erskine is really a greater fool than I could have thought it possible to be, and it is charity to give him _that_ name.... Now that I have gone through all his correspondence, more than ever am I at a loss to comprehend how he could have been allowed to remain here for the last two years.... To be obliged to wade through such a mass of folly and stupidity, and to observe how our country has been made, through Erskine’s means, the instrument of these people’s cunning, is not the least part of my annoyance. Between them our cause is vilified indeed. The tone which Erskine had accustomed them to use with him, and to use without any notion whatever being taken of it, is another great difficulty I have had to overcome. Every third word was a declaration of war.”