best of fish after they were skinned.

"I have made this account of the expedition to please Uncle Richard, who
is an invalid and cannot get out to enjoy such sport, and wished me to
describe everything just as it had happened, whether witty or silly, and
give my own impressions. He has read my diary, and says that it
interested him, which is all the reward I desire. And now I add these
lines to keep in remembrance the peculiar satisfaction I received in
hearing the conversation, especially of Mr. Deblois and Mr. Little.
August, 1818, Raymond."

* * * * *

These extracts from the Raymond Journal, if they be genuine, as in most
respects I believe they must be, will furnish a clew, otherwise wanting,
to the distinct turn which the boy's mind took toward authorship after
his return to Salem, and on passing the propylon of classical culture.
We can also see in them, I think, the beginning of that painstaking
accumulation of fact, the effort to be first of all accurate, which is a
characteristic of his maturer and authenticated note-books; very
significant, too, is the dash of the supernatural and his tone
concerning it. A habit of thus preserving impressions, and of communing
with himself through the pen, so constant and assiduous as we know it to
have been in his later years,--even when mind and time were
preoccupied,--must have been formed early, to retain so strong a hold
upon him. But there is another reason for supposing that he had begun to
compose with care before coming from Raymond to Salem; and this is found
in the fact that, in 1820, he began issuing (probably to a very small
and intimate circle of subscribers) a neat little weekly paper printed
with the pen on sheets of a much-curtailed note size, and written in an