have determined to accept the invitation you gave us last summer for
Harold to come and spend a few months with you. His father thinks
that a great future will, ere many years, open in the West, and that
it is therefore well the boy should learn something of frontier life.
For myself, I would rather that he stayed quietly at home, for he is
at present over-fond of adventure; but as my husband is meditating
selling his estate here and moving West, it is perhaps better for him.

"Massachusetts is in a ferment, as indeed are all the Eastern States,
and the people talk openly of armed resistance against the
Government. My husband, being of English birth and having served in
the king's army, cannot brook what he calls the rebellious talk which
is common among his neighbors, and is already on bad terms with many
around us. I myself am, as it were, a neutral. As an American woman,
it seems to me that the colonists have been dealt with somewhat
hardly by the English Parliament, and that the measures of the latter
have been high-handed and arbitrary. Upon the other hand, I naturally
incline toward my husband's views. He maintains that, as the king's
army has driven out the French, and gives protection to the colony,
it is only fair that the colonists should contribute to its expenses.
The English ask for no contributions toward the expense of their own
country, but demand that, at least, the expenses of the protection of
the colony shall not be charged upon the heavily taxed people at
home. As to the law that the colony shall trade only with the mother
country, my husband says that this is the rule in the colonies of
Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and that the people
here, who can obtain what land they choose and till it without rent,
should not grumble at paying this small tax to the mother country.
However it be, I fear that troubles will come, and, this place being
the head and focus of the party hostile to England, my husband,