If I mistake not, the printing of the report of the sinking fund was considerably delayed. Be that as it may, when Mr. Griswold moved to commit it to the Ways and Means he specified no objection; he barely said that there were some parts which required explanation; but, as all documents of that sort are of course committed to that committee, there was no occasion for any reasoning to induce the House to agree to such a motion. The resolution which he afterwards drafted, and which he showed to me, was, I believe, couched in the very terms of that which was passed by the House, the words "in fact" excepted, which at my suggestion he expunged, since he declared that he had no intention to criminate the Treasury and doubted not that everything could and would be satisfactorily explained. I then proposed to him to reduce his objections to writing. They consisted of a denial of the soundness of the construction given by the Treasury to the law of 1802 making provision for the redemption of the whole public debt, which was the object embraced by the resolution; and an inquiry into the variance between the report of the Secretary of the Treasury of December, 1801, and the report of the sinking fund, in respect to the amount of interest of the public debt and the instalments of the Dutch debt due in 1802. There may have been some items which I do not recollect. But I perfectly remember what they did not contain. There was not a syllable about the unaccounted balance of 114,000 dollars, nor of the detailed accounts in relation to the remittances on account of the foreign debt, contained in the 4th, 7th, and part of the 3d queries in my official letter to you (A. 1). The first intelligence which I had of this unaccounted balance was from yourself. It made its appearance in a pamphlet ascribed to Stanley and addressed to his constituents. So careful were the friends of this little work that it should not get abroad, that by mere accident a single copy fell into the hands of Alston on the day before Mr. Griswold brought forward his motion. Huger, who let Alston have it, enjoined him not to let it go out of his hands. He on the contrary carried it to you, and during the short time that it was in your possession I accidentally stepped in whilst you were looking over it, and this was the first notice which I received of Mr. Griswold's redoubtable attack on that point. It may be proper to add that when he put into my hands the paper containing the first objections to the report, I offered to transmit them to you, provided he would move it in committee; and the committee were actually convened for that purpose, but he did not attend. He declined also a proposition of waiting on you in person when I offered to accompany him. The committee taking no order on his objections, they were submitted to you by me, and so long a time elapsed that I really conceived he had abandoned his project. On our return home Alston told me that Huger was very much irritated against