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 welcome to me.  I will not promise again until I do it.  I received a note last week forwarded by Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there.  But my brother writes me that he had left New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings.  I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face.