te for magazines and papers, and
publishers besiege me to write books. Can't do any of these things.

I am twenty-two thousand dollars in debt, and shall earn the money
and pay it within two years--and therefore I am not spending any money
except when it is necessary.

I had my life insured for $10,000 yesterday (what ever became of Mr.
Moffett' s life insurance?) "for the benefit of my natural heirs"--the
same being my mother, for Livy wouldn't claim it, you may be sure of
that. This has taken $200 out of my pocket which I was going to send
to Ma. But I will send her some, soon. Tell Orion to keep a stiff upper
lip--when the worst comes to the worst I will come forward. Must talk in
Providence, R. I., tonight. Must leave now. I thank Mollie and Orion and
the rest for your letters, but you see how I am pushed--ought to have 6
clerks.

Affectionately,
SAM.

By the end of January, 1870 more than thirty thousand copies of the
Innocents had been sold, and in a letter to his publisher the author
expressed his satisfaction.

*****

To Elisha Bliss, in Hartford:

ELMIRA, Jan. 28 '70.

FRIEND BLISS,--.... Yes, I am satisfied with the way you are running the
book. You are running it in staving, tip-top, first-class style. I never
wander into any corner of the country but I find that an agent has been
there before me, and many of that community have read the book. And on
an average about ten people a day come and hunt me up to thank me and
tell me I'm a benefactor! I guess this is a part of the programme we
didn't expect in the first place.

I think you are rushing this book in a manner to be proud of; and
you will make the finest success of it that has ever been made with
a subscription book, I believe. What with advertising, establishing
agencies, &c., you have got an enormous lot of machinery under way and
hard at work in a wonderfully short space of time. It is easy to see,
when one travels around, that one must be endowed with a deal of genuine
generalship in order to maneuvre a publication whose line of battle
stretches from end to end of a great continent, and whose foragers and
skirmishers invest every hamlet and besiege every village hidden away in
all the vast space between.

I'll back you against any publisher in America, Bliss--or elsewhere.