So never come to Idlewild, my dear Morris, or venture to look at the old hat (which now surmounts the bust of John Quincy Adams in the hall), until you have done your possible with the secretary of war, for Billy Babcock and his revolutionary claims.
But I was indebted to the old man, shortly after, for a sudden retrospect, which, I fear, I can hardly make interesting to you—the contrast and grotesqueness of it depending very much on the associations it awakened in my own memory. Driving to Newburgh in the afternoon, we met him, at a sudden turn of the road. 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. The suit chanced to be the sole memorial of that "dandyism" of twenty years ago, the pickled memory of which is still carefully preserved by my brother editors, and used for the acid to their criticisms. Both coat and trowsers were of London make, in 1836—relics that had seen a deal of sly wear as old clothes in my rainy-day
