I have watched with anxious solicitude the successive reports of your board of health, always hoping that some favorable change would take place in the State of the disorder which seemed to threaten your City. The last accounts appear to us very alarming, particularly as they correspond very nearly with those from New York, Baltimore & Norfolk, & seem for this reason to prove that the Sickness is not local, but dependent in a great measure on the unfriendliness of the season, aided no doubt by imported causes. It will be very important to me to decide before I leave Virginia whether we shall hold a court for your District or not. From your Situation you will be enabled to form a Judgement upon the question to which I shall be entirely willing to subscribe. But that question is not, I think, whether the Judges & Lawyers are willing to encounter the risk of doing business; is their a probability that Jurymen & witnesses will attend? Will it be better to adjourn the court until January when we can devote a month to business with a certainty of doing it, or shall [w]e make the attempt in October & encounter the chance of a defeat? For if I should be compelled to linger 9 or 10 days after the rising of the Court at Trenton in the neighbourhood of Phila., & then return without holding an effectual Session there, it would be unreasonable to expect that I should return in January, nor could I think of doing it. Be so good then as to inform me your opinion that my arrangements may be made to correspond with either plan. I leave home on Monday and shall spend a few days over the ridge, from whence I purpose proceeding in the stage by the way of Lancaster to Trenton. Address your letter to me "at Wheatlands near Charlestown, Jefferson County.["] I shall leave that place on the 25th instant.

I should be very happy to call upon you as I go on, & will do so, if I can get a conveyance from the middle ferry. I expect to be there certainly on the 29th. With very sincere esteem & regard I am my dear Sir respectfully yrs