rstand as well as I. Fraser will announce it in his
Magazine: the eager, select public will wait. Probably, there
is no chance before the middle of March or so? Do not hurry
yourselves, or at all change your rate for _us:_ but so soon as
the work is ready in the course of Nature, the earliest
conveyance to the Port of London will bring a little cargo which
one will welcome with a strange feeling! I declare myself
delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of
romance and reality: fancy me riding on _Yankee_ withal, at the
time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes
bread for one beyond the great Ocean-stream, and how a poor man
is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the
fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere.
_Allah akbar!_ God is great; no saying truer than that.--And so
now, by the blessing of Heaven, we will talk no more of business
this day.

My employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a
long chapter; on which I could like so well to talk with you
face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery.
In these four years, so full of pain and toil, I seem to have
lived four decades. By degrees, the creature gets accustomed to
its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be
of the same temperature with it. Ah me! I feel as if grown
old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and
unprofitable. And yet perhaps I am not old, only wearied, and
there is a stroke or two of work in me yet. For the rest, the
fret and agitation of this Babylon wears me down: it is the most
unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction
which no head can reconcile. Pain and poverty are not wholesome;
but praise and flattery along with them are poison: God deliver
us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! On
the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as
_rest?_ A sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be
entirely cherubic, _all_ face and wings. "Mes enfans," said a
French gentleman to the cherubs in the Picture, "Mes enfans,
asseyez-vous?"--"Monseigneur," answer they, "il n'y a pas de
quoi!" I rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that I _can_
sit.--But, after all, ought I not to be thankful? I positively
can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing I had been
for many years ambitious of to no purpose. I shall have to
lec