[Letter from Elizabeth Upshur Teackle to her sister, Ann Upshur Eyre, November 22, 1813]

P.A. 22^d Nov. 13

My dear sister

After waiting several days for the atmosphere of my Beotian¹ pain to clear off that my ideas might shine forth through the mist of my hazy words so as to be discernable to the sense; at last, in total despair, and darkness, after all, you will have to stretch out the arms of your wit to feel out the object of this letter, as I must write in a fog or not at all. You asked me what had made my head so disorderly disorder’d, particularly, now. Why, I can’t tell: It is a mulish head at best, and sometimes, when there is no ostensible hindrance and it will not go, for either spur or rein. Then, all of a sudden, when any rational head wou’d seem to have been curbed by circumstance it will trot off at a round ambling gait, and mush on farther and swifter ‘till it runs absolutely riot; not waiting to be guided by rhyme, nor reason. I can’t account for its curvettings². It is, (as you say of your proper person) a lupus naturae³ and wou’d puzzle a Buffoon to assign it properties, or analyze its nature. On the whole, I think it partakes of the Ass more than any other animal of magnitude, but for seeing through a millstone, it is, in sooth, a very mole.

I have been half crazed with business this fall, and have done nothing but speculate on what is to be done. Here’s the Virginia

cloth, with all et ce teras that follow in its train with pokeberry dye, bay leaves, and dye pots, &c. Then there are the waterfowls to get in, and make fat, (a business that will weigh more trouble than meat when it is over). Wheat to pick, wash, and send to Mill to be cheated as much in the toll as in the growing, shoes to make, and shoe thread to skin; and to “cap the climax"⁴ we have three or four old barn-like houses to rent to squalid applicants, with red cloaks and tatter’d black bonnets, who torment me more than so many Endors.⁵ One bawls in my ear “Missus Teagle I am a poor lone woman, with a house full of ga’als, if I had but a boy to help me along! So now, ra’aly you must speak a word for me to Mr. Teagle. I shill be turn’t out a’ Christmas, or afore for what I know, and thare, my sallet, what will I do wi’ my sallet? A finikin lady says “if you let that Mrs. ___ in to the room next mine with her ga’als, I can’t stay in the house, fur they’r of a bad carectur and people may take us all for the like together. They’r brickbatted every Saturday night, and I might get my head knock’d off, for who’d know who was who?” What can be said to such logic? What maiden can be blamed for wanting to protect her head? So you see what a vast turmoil of business I have upon me, and I have not told you half. Is not all this enough to crack my brain and fogmatize my wits? I have not had leisure

for an elegant thought, or subject for an elegant expression since. Heaven knows when! Not since my head was woolgathering first, nor since I was bitten by madness in the shape of a merino sheep. My present occupations so warp me from the bent of my nature, that I scarcely recognize my own ideas when I chance to get a glimpse of them in the form of an old letter copy, or string of rhymes, written when I was half seas over in the voyage. “If lady is me” in the full tide of successful experiment “alas those times are over; but I have had my day.”

We have had a very clever interesting young stranger amongst us. Ann Upshur’s uncle, Henry Murray. I took a fancy to him at first sight, but cou’d not rouse myself from my lethargy of don’t care even sufficiently to give him an idea of my powers, which by the bye, I begin to think are actually on the incline in good earnest. When Mr. Murray took leave of me, I begged him to stay longer with us in P. A. “Ah!” says I “you had better stay with us a little longer; perhaps you may never see me again and that will so grieve you.” “Dear madam” says he, “I will not suffer so frightful an image to take possession of my mind.” “So then you are determin'd to forget me! Very well, sir!” “Oh for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone of this. What a most malicious construction!” “Oh no, I’ll only tell a few of my friends of your gallantry, a frightful image! Very well, Mr. Murray!”