I returned home the day before yesterday after an absence of about four months. It was my intention not to address you until I could get time to forward you my report of the decisions made on my late Circuit, many of which are highly interesting.

Altho I have been at home upwards of six weeks, yet this is the first day when it has been in my power to write to you. My whole time, when it was not engaged by company, has been devoted to a chancery suit in which I am, involved as Executor of Genl W., the entire management of which devolves necessarily upon me.

Mr. Marshall requests that you will endeavour to procure for him from the editor of the Lancaster Journal or of the federal paper in that place the original letter from Genl Washington, which he has published.

Your letter of the 3d. inst. I have received, and hope that my acknowledgment of one or both of your former letters has reached you before this. If I have not been as punctual in answering letters for a month past as usual, the painful sickness & death of Major Blackburn to whom my whole time was devoted must be my apology.

I now enclose you a certificate that you have purchased the American copy right to the life of Gen Washington, tho' with the contract in your pocket, I can hardly conceive how this can be necessary. I presume the best way will be for you to have this certificate subjoined to your proposals which are inserted in the different papers. This will be better that to let it appear as an independent thing, which would seem to imply that your right had been questioned, altho you had asserted it.