15 September: At six thirty, temperature of 11°R [56.8°F, 13.8°C]. Mr. Bodmer had spent the night without sleep and in great pain. The bandage had to be removed from his hand. Today I wrote several letters, including one to the missionary Halter at Shiloh in Africa, about whom I had read in the last mission reports; another one to Mr. Auguste de St. Hilaire in Montpellier. In the afternoon we undertook a carriage ride to Allentown, 6 miles from Bethlehem. The road leads through a hilly region. One passes the Jordan Creek, then the Lecha by means of a wooden bridge, and reaches Allentown, the county seat of Lehigh County. The town is divided rather regularly into several streets, has some quite nice houses, three churches and a courthouse, and about 1,700 inhabitants. On the way back we took the lower road along the Lecha, where a herd of 300 to 400 Ohio oxen was just being driven through. Several herds of this kind had already been driven through Bethlehem. In Philadelphia, cattle sell for about forty dollars a head. Along the water below, we came upon various kinds of birds in the fields, while the woods revealed nothing more than the nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis) and wild doves. On the fences of the fields, we saw a flight of at least twenty bluebirds (Sylvia sialis) and three or four yellow woodpeckers (Picus auratus). The former had already flocked together to migrate and were skimming about. The evening was very warm today.