Since the date of my last Letter, a whole long winter has passed off,
which I have whiled away on the Gulf of Mexico and about the shores of
Florida and Texas. My health was soon restored by the congenial climate
I there found, and my dear wife was my companion the whole way. We
visited the different posts, and all that we could find to interest us
in these delightful realms, and took steamer from New Orleans to this
place, where we arrived but a few days since.
Supposing that the reader by this time may be somewhat tired of
following me in my erratic wanderings over these wild regions, I have
resolved to sit down awhile before I go further, and open to him my
_sketch-book_, in which I have made a great many entries, as I have
been dodging about, and which I have not as yet shewed to him, for want
of requisite time and proper opportunity.
In opening this book, the reader will allow me to turn over leaf after
leaf, and describe to him, tribe after tribe, and chief after chief,
of many of those whom I have visited, without the tediousness of
travelling too minutely over the intervening distances; in which I fear
I might lose him as a fellow-traveller, and leave him fagged out by the
way-side, before he would see all that I am anxious to show him.