No sir, I wasn’t blackguarding you for delaying to answer. Exactly the res verse. My letter was hardly out of my hand till I was saying, “There, it is gone, & I have forgotten to say, ‘This needs no answer’—so IⒶemendation have gone & laid one more burden upon a man whose guards were in the water already—will never t neglect that P.S. again!.” The debt was discharged when you sent the Hammond pamphlet—& I so considered it. I took that to be your answer.

Autobiog’s? I didn’t know there were any but old Franklin’s & Benvenuto Che Cellini’s. But if I should think of any I will mention them with pleasure.

I am more delighted about Barrett & the play than I can express. I hope you get good terms out of him, & have drawn your contract from the standpoint that he is the blackest-livered scoundrel on earth. That is the standpoint of our contract with Parsloe, who is a mighty good fellow & as gentle as a lamb.

Blast a man who lets on that he is going to buy a man’s house, & then doesn’t do it. However, there is a hell. That thought calms me even in my bitterest moments.

I have written two Numbers of my “Random Notes of an Idle Excursion” (you see that does not indicate whither the ship is bound & therefore the reader can’t be saying “Why all this introduction—are we never coming to Bermuda?”) The reader never discovers whither the ship is bound, until the last paragraph of the second number informs him. It begins to look as if this Excursion may string out to 4 or 6 Numbers. Will re-read & correct & forward 1 & 2 when I get to Elmira. (We leave for there to-day.)

Now if you should print these things, couldn’t you set them up 2 or 3 months before you are going to use them, so that I can have duplicate proofs & simultane with Temple Bar? The love of our crowd to yours.