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[387] and an apparatus for shooting, ample enough to lay waste the Cape from here to Race Point, let alone a quantity of rods, water-proof breeches, and trout-destroying hooks. I have been out myself several times, with that notorious personage John Trout,1 and, though I cannot make up my mind to wade the brooks and the marshes as deeply as he does, I have had some luck.2

But Mr. Webster is a true sportsman. He was out thirteen hours to-day, without any regular meal, and is now as busy as a locksmith, with his guns. He seems to feel as if it were the one thing needful to kill birds, and neither to tire nor grow hungry while one can be seen. It has already made him look bright and strong again, for he came from Nantucket in but a poor condition.

But my note is called for, to be packed with the birds. Good night. We shall come home with the first cool weather. Love to Susan.

Yours always,

G. T.

From his marriage until this time Mr. Ticknor had dwelt in hired houses. Now, however, in 1829, he found what he had so long been waiting to find, a house which he was satisfied to buy, and there he made his home for the remaining forty-one and a half years of his life. The situation, the proportions and taste, and the ample size of this residence, sufficed for all the needs of domestic and social hours; and here, in joy and in sorrow, from far-off lands and from the inner recesses of heart and mind, was gathered ‘treasure of things new and old.’

The homes of almost all his friends, and his own dwelling-places,—since his return from Europe,—looked on the little park of forty-five acres, which, in spite of the seeming modesty of its traditional name, the Common, has always been the pride and joy of the Boston heart. His new house stood at the most attractive point of the margin of the Common, at the top of the slope looking down the avenue of elms of the finest of its malls, and facing to the southwest, so as to catch the prevailing

1 ‘That well-known angler, John Denison, usually called John Trout.’— Curtis's Life of Webster, Vol. I. p. 251.

2 Mr. Ticknor often expressed some regret that he had never found pleasure in fishing or shooting, nor in billiards, for he considered the variety of exercise thus gained to be very desirable for a student. He never liked riding, after his training for health at the riding-school in Gottingen—which, however, made him a good rider-and his long journeys in Spain.

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