The sun broke cheerfully into our new Quarters this morning and gave us the promise of a lovely day. I took up Spenser’s Fairy Queen and read the sixth canto of the second book before going out.1 Then to the Office where I was engaged in my usual routine. Thence a walk. 137At home, began Juvenal and read seventy lines but with great difficulty and not with a full understanding of the Text.2

Afternoon as the weather was fine and I felt indolent, I thought I would take a drive round the Country. The trees are not yet out and the vegetation is barely lively enough to relieve the eye. I went through the cultivated parts of Brookline and Roxbury, a very pretty but rather too densely settled tract for Country. Home to tea.

Somewhat alarmed by the information that the houses at the end of our Avenue had been entered by thieves last night and all the silver stolen. This is coming rather near home and I have no small stake in the silver way. It is somewhat singular that in this good city of steady habits, these things should be suffered to go on with impunity now for the greater part of a year. The Watch are as certain to be as out of the way as possible. I took all the precautions I could think of before going to bed but felt strongly the difference of care that my new situation involves me in. I resumed an old and long discontinued plan of copying important papers which I find among my Grandfather’s.