solution came back to me. It is not for his good that he
have friends in the ship. His conduct in the Bacon business shows that
he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose
from your apron strings.

You don't teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself,
but you do just the reverse. You are assisted in your damaging work by
the tyrannous ways of a village--villagers watch each other and so
make cowards of each other. After Sam shall have voyaged to Europe by
himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs,
do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in
Fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there?
No, he will smile at the idea. If he avoids this courtesy now from
principle, of course I find no fault with it at all--only if he thinks
it is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is
only a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion.

I only say it may--I cannot venture to say it will. Hartford is not a
large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort. Three
or four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a
letter from somebody "exposing" the fact that a prominent clergyman had
gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank
it on the premises (a drug store.)

A tempest of indignation swept the town. Our clergymen and everybody
else said the "culprit" had not only done an innocent thing, but had
done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody's right or business to
find fault with it. Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact
that we never have any temperance "rot" going on in Hartford.

I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story
for criticism. When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can
and bang away. I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but
3 days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a
bushel and a half of letters. I am very nearly tired to death.

I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not
remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got
up and said so and excused myself from speaking. I arrived here at 3
o'clock this morning. I think the next 3 days will finish me. The idea
of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous.

A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed