SOLON ROBINSON, 1845 499 



the English nor native thorn will succeed in making a 

 good and durable fence, till I see it proved. But I like 

 to see the subject agitated about fencing in all possible 

 and impossible ways; for to one certain result will it 

 lead at last, and that is — no fence at all. But not till a 

 few more hundred millions of dollars have been spent 

 upon the present miserable system. 



And now, having despatched this matter "with a word 

 and a blow," and as I think "according to the merits of 

 the case," I have nothing to add, only that being done 

 over by your critics, I have done with them. "Let the 

 hardest fend off." 



Lake C. H., Indiana, May 2, 1845. 



Mountains and Moralizing — Politics — Penitentiary 

 and Peaches — and Other Things. 



[Daily Cincinnati Gazette, June 4, 1845] 



"At Home," Lake C. H., la., May 12, 1845. 

 My old Friends: — I did not write you "from the moun- 

 tains of Tenn," as I insinuated in my last 1 that I intended 

 to do, because I did not find myself on the top of any of 

 them that were high enough to elevate my ideas to the 

 starting point. And I did not write from the Mammoth 

 Cave of Kentucky, because I did not choose — like some 

 travellers I know of — to write of things that I have not 

 seen. I was turned aside from my purpose, by letters 

 at Nashville, that hurried me onward toward that place, 

 to which the sensitive mind of every husband and father 

 so earnestly yearns to return, particularly when he hears 

 that sickness and distress has entered in his absence, 

 and that there was a messenger in the neighborhood 

 summoning many of the wanderers of the earth to go 

 with him to a home from which they would never wander 

 again. And to this home we are all hastening with a 

 speed that should warn us to choose that road which will 



1 Letter of March 23, 1845, in Daily Cincinnati Gazette, April 4. 



