"We hope you will feel more than ever the absolute necessity laid upon you to procure for yourself and those you love a maintenance, as neither of you can subsist long upon air.... Remember it takes a great many hundred dollars to _make_ and to _keep_ the pot a-boiling. "I wish to see the young lady who has captivated you so much. I hope she loves religion, and that, if you and she form a connection for life, some _five or six years hence_, you may go hand in hand to that better world where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.... "You have not given us any satisfaction in respect to many things about the young lady which you ought to suppose we should be anxious to know. All you have told us is that she is handsome and amiable. These are good as far as they go, but there are a great many etcs., etcs., that we want to know. "Is she acquainted with domestic affairs? Does she respect and love religion? How many brothers and sisters has she? How old are they? Is she healthy? How old are her parents? What will they be likely to do for her some years hence, say when she is twenty years old? "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_....