Nathaniel Parker Willis

“ He had been down with a load of baskets (eight miles, on foot) , and was returning to the mountains—toddling jauntily along with his stick, but the mud and other signs showing that he had stopped to rest when quite too happy to mind where. He was dressed from head to foot in a suit of my own clothes which I had given him; and though it was funny, of course, to see my coat and trowsers going to Newburgh with a load of baskets, and coming back "so," there was still, for me, a remoter reach of association in the spectacle. ”

“ Every particle of snow gone from the fields and mountains, and a sun so warm, that to the children exercising out of doors, the full shade of our groves of hemlocks and cedars is welcome! The farmer, about here, is bothered with the luxuriant pertinacity of these evergreens. ”

“ As the hat I got by my bargain is a relic, having been worn by a revolutionary head while crossing from its first to its second century, and two years beyond the crossing, I must be excused for giving the history of "our trade" rather circumstantially—the hat being thus made authentic by having its story told, and the wearer being brought to your charitable notice, "as agreed."
My friend Torrey, the village blacksmith, had sevral times offered to "show me the beat" of the revolutionary soldier I visited and described in the Home Journal last summer. ”

“ He was as blithe and quick-witted as ever, and his gaiety—patriarch as he is—was positively infections. It is the elixir of his unfailing vitality, I am certain. He has no idea of dying, and is "coming round in the spring, to see if that General has got his pension fixed." ”

“ It was amusing to see the cunning old chap assume a value for his hat immediately on finding it was wanted, and dodge all admission that he was making a good bargain. He only agreed, finally, on condition of my "speaking to my friend the General about his pension." ”

“ I find, by the number and earnestness of the strangers who have thus written to me, that there is a very large Public of Unrest, composed of Invalids—consumptives more particularly—whose main and most hopeful inquiry is for some new catholicon of health. ”

“ His one steady idea seemed to be to get a pension, as he had served six years in the revolutionary army, and had been in the battle of Monmouth and the battle of Stony Point, and was wounded at Monmouth. ”