COLONEL INGHAM:--

I have your note complaining of the sensational title, "somewhat
affected," as you think, which I gave to our little story-book. Of
course I am sorry you do not like the name; but, while you strike,
I beg you to hear.

I readily acceded to your original title, and called the book in
manuscript as you bade me,--

"A Few Short Sketches taken from Ancient History, Modern Travel,
and the Realm of Imagination, Illustrative of the Poetry of the
Bible, the History of Christianity, the Manners of the Times, and
the Politics of the Present and Past Generations."

This title would, I admit, meet the views of most of our present
critics. But I abandoned it on my own responsibility,--you being
then beyond the telegraph, at the mouth of the Oby River,--because
it occurred to me, that, under the catalogue rules of Panizzi and
the lamented Jewett, we should be indexed and catalogued at "Few."
I did not think that a good omen.

Relinquishing, therefore, the effort at description of subject, I
tried description of object, and determined on this:--

"Moral Sketches of Human Society, in the Past, the Present, and
Imagined Worlds." By F. I., &c., &c., &c.

But, as I slept and waked on this, I said, "Who knows that these
are _moral_ sketches?" We wished them to be moral, but Ingham's
have been attacked by such patient critics as read them as being
immoral, while many of the sketches seem to have no moral at all.
Who are we, to claim that we have attained a moral standard?

Waking and sleeping once more, I asked myself, "What are the
things,--poor, nameless heathen children, that can get no sponsor
and no Christian baptism?"

I said, in reply, that at least one of them was the living truth,
so far as it could be squeezed out of blue books and the most
proper of documents. Others might have been true, if the destinies
had so willed. Others would have been true, had they not been
untrue. Others should have been true, had poetical justice been the
working rule of a vulgar world.

"Might, Could, Would, or Should," then, would have been an
available name for most of them,--unless one took from the older
grammars the title of "The Potential Mood."

But, you observe, my dear Ingham, that our little story-book is
destined most