uestion so grave and
humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever
probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have
been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a
preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is
riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have
influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent
it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London
book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it.
Their estimate is:--

Printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35
Paper .....................................44.00
Binding .................................. 90.00
Total .................................... $197.35

Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound.
The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission
twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen
cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,--
no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it
at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days.
I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am
expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of
R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the
facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his
craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful
experiments myself.

I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord
out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture
that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be
possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our
advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find
what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that
betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I
shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine,
that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still
extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men
read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek
Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before
such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a
better, certainly a bigger.--I am sad to hear that Sterling sails
again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to
him, as his letter was very