ns had already taken advice and had discussed the project a good
deal with Richardson. The ten thousand dollars was a heavy temptation,
but he withstood it and closed on the royalty basis--"the best business
judgment I ever displayed," he was wont to declare. A letter written to
his mother and sister near the end of this Hartford stay is worth quoting
pretty fully here, for the information and "character" it contains. It
bears date of January 24th.

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 about
anybody and everything 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 anyhow. But the
best thing that has happened is 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 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 you know more than enough to come in when it rains.
I'll tell you what to do and how to do it." And he did.

And I listened well, and then came up here and made a splendid
contract for a Quaker City book of 5 or 600 large pages, with
illustrations, the manuscript to be placed in the publisher's hands
by the middle of July.--[The contract was not a formal one. There
was an exchange of letters agreeing to the terms, but no joint
document was drawn until October 16 (1868).]--My percentage is to
be a fourth more than they have ever paid any author except Greeley.
Beecher will be surprised, I guess, when he hears this.

These publishers get off the most tremendous editions of their books
you can imagine. I shall write to the Enterprise and Alta every
week, as usual, I guess, and to the Herald twice a week,
occasionally to the Tribune and the magazines (I have a stupid
article in the Galaxy, just