I have got a thousand things to do, and am not doing any of them. I feel perfectly savage.

                         Good bye
                                   Yrs aff
                                             SAM.

     On the whole, matters were going well with him.  His next letter is
     full of his success—overflowing with the boyish radiance which he
     never quite outgrew.

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and Mrs. Moffett, in St. Louis:

                                        HARTFORD, CONN.  Jan. 24-68.

DEAR MOTHER AND SISTER,—This is a good week for me. I stopped in the Herald office as I came through New York, to see the boys on the staff, and young James Gordon Bennett asked me to write twice a week, impersonally, for the Herald, and said if I would I might have full swing, and (write) about anybody and everybody I wanted to. I said I must have the very fullest possible swing, and he said "all right." I said "It's a contract—" and that settled that matter.

I'll make it a point to write one letter a week, any-how.

But the best thing that has happened was here. This great American Publishing Company kept on trying to bargain with me for a book till I thought I would cut the matter short by coming up for a talk. I met Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, and with his usual whole-souled way of dropping his own work to give other people a lift when he gets a chance, he said, "Now, here, you are one of the talented men of the age—nobody is going to deny that—-but in matters of business, I don't suppose