Working away on edits on "the most esteemed act of my life," especially the part on Henry Watson, a lawyer from Greensboro. He wrote home to his mother in Connecticut with a description of his law office in September 1841:
You must consider me as sitting in a little brown framed office, neither lathed or plastered, showing all the joists, clapboarding and shingling, unplaned, unpainted and unpapered and only about 16 feet square. Imagine a latten window shutter and latten door (a front and a back) and wide open and myself sitting at a little yellow-pine unpainted desk with four unpainted homemade chairs standing about, one split-bottomed, two bottomed with husks, and one with rawhide. You will now [illegible] up the likes of the office with musty, dusty, newspapers, old books, and files & bundles of letters and documents, some new, some old & musty. Be careful not to mar the brownness of the outside of the office with one drop of paint of any color. You have now a fair view of me …
The illustration is of a law office from nearby Eutaw, Alabama–obviously somewhat nicer than Watson's office, but from about the same period.