The new year, 1781, found Hazard on the road and Belknap in bed. Indeed so sick was Belknap with rheumatism that after his letter of Christmas Day, 1780, he was not able to write for over two months. Hazard, meanwhile, was travelling towards Jamaica Plain and Dr Gordon's home when the New Year arrived. Such was his attention to business, however, that he was unable to write to Belknap until earlyFebruary.

Hazard wrote from Portsmouth, ten miles downriver from Dover; he apologized for not being able to visit his friend: ‘for however great my friendship for you is, as well as my anxiety for an interview with you, I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to go to Dover now’. Hazard was trying to drum up takers of tickets for a lottery sponsored by unnamed persons from the south involved in an unnamed scheme that Hazard was willing to term simply (and vaguely) ‘admiralty business’. Belknap (and others since then) had hardly a clue to what Hazard was referring; Belknap left well enough alone, and so shall we.

No, Hazard wrote, he was not in the business of ‘either love or matrimony’. Nor would he be for some time, so that ‘Mrs. B … will hardly be able to salute Mrs. H. before the war is over’. Until then, Hazard's love was history and science.