Saw a farmer on the Neck with one of Palmer’s patent wood legs. He went but little lame and said that he did his own mowing and most of his ordinary farm work, though plowing in the present state of his limb, which had not yet healed, wrenched him some . . .

  This Neck, like the New Bedford country generally, is very flat to my eye, even as far inland as Middleborough. When R. [Daniel Ricketson] decided to take another road home from the latter place, because it was less hilly, I said I had not observed a hill in all our ride . . . I had been expecting to find the aletris about New Bedford, and when taking our luncheon on this neck what should I see rising above the luncheon-box, between me and R., but what I knew must be the Aletris farinosa . . .

  Talked with a farmer by name of Slocum, hoeing on the Neck, a rather dull and countrified fellow for our neighborhood, I should have said . . .

  Heard of, and sought out, the hut of Martha Simons, the only pure-blooded Indian left about New Bedford . . . The squaw was not at home when we first called . . . She ere long came in from the seaside, and we called again. We knocked and walked in, and she asked us to sit down . . .

  A conceited old Quaker minister, her neighbor, told me with a sanctified air, “I think that the Indians were human beings; dost thee not think so?” He only convinced me of his doubt and narrowness.