cations to republish my books
have reached me from Germany than from any other country. For a while,
with the tenderness of a novice in such experience, I kept all these
foreign curiosities on my book-shelves; but the throes of several New
England "movings" have scattered their ashes.

Not long ago I came across a tiny pamphlet in which I used to feel more
honest pride than in any edition of "The Gates Ajar" which it has ever
been my fortune to handle. It is a sickly yellow thing, covered with a
coarse design of some kind, in which the wings of a particularly sprawly
angel predominate.

The print is abhorrent, and the paper such as any respectable publisher
would prepare to be condemned for in this world and in that to come. In
fact, the entire book was thus given out by one of the most enterprising
of English pirates, as an advertisement for a patent medicine. I have
never traced the chemical history of the drug; but it has pleased my
fancy to suppose it to be the one in which Mrs. Holt, the mother of
Felix, dealt so largely; and whose sale Felix put forth his mighty
conscience to suppress.

Of course, owing to the state of our copyright laws at that time, all
this foreign publication was piratical; and most of it brought no
visible consequence to the author, beyond that cold tribute to personal
vanity on which our unlucky race is expected to feed. I should make an
exception. The house of Sampson, Low and Company honorably offered me,
at a very early date, a certain recognition of their editions. Other
reputable English houses since, in the case of succeeding books, have
passed contracts of a gentlemanly nature, with the disproportionately
grateful author, who was, of course, entirely at their mercy. When an
American writer compares the sturdy figures of the foreign circulation
with the attenuated numerals of such visible returns as reach him, he is
more puzzled in his mind than surfeited in his purse. But the relation
of foreign publishers to "home talent" is an ancient and honorable
conundrum, which it is not for this paper or its writer to solve.

Nevertheless, I found the patent medicine "Gates Ajar" delicious, and
used to compare it with Messrs. Fields and Osgood's edition _de
luxe_ with an undisguised delight, which I found it difficult to
induce the best of publishers to share.

Like most such matters, the first energy of the book had its funny and
its serious side. A man coming from a far Western village,