☞ Tell these contents to nobody but Mollie. 1explanatory note

I have just come down from Hartford, Conn., where I have made a tip-top Ⓐemendationcontract for a 600-page book, & I feel perfectly jolly. It is with the Ⓐemendationheaviest publishing house in America, & I get the best terms they have ever offered any man save one.2explanatory note The manuscript is to be ready the middle of July. It would take a good deal of money to buy out the s undersigned now, old boy.

I put that postscript at the top of the letter because the above paragraph contains business matters, & they ought always to be kept reasonably dark.

Mr. Bennett of the New York Herald tells me that if I will correspond twice a week from Washington, I may abuse & ridicule anybody & every body I please. Well, I said, “We will just take one drink on that—all I have been wanting, for a year, is to find a paper that will give me room according to my strength—& pay me double price.” He said the Herald would do both. I have two weekly Pacific coast correspondences—I’ll raise on them, also, & write very seldom for the Tribune—& then I’ll sail in & write that book. If it were not for that book, I would just show these newspaper men how easy it is to make a stack of greenbacks every week—but the book is going to crowd me some—I shall have to cut off all outside work, & it is growing pretty lucrative. I could make eight hundred a month so easily if I didn’t have the book to write.

Will, I was ever so sorry to hear of your bereavement3explanatory note—but at the same time I could not help reflecting that you are still very, very fortunately situated, for you have a most excellent wife—a good, kind, affectionate comrade in all the vicissitudes of life & one who will always prefer rather to overlook your shortcomings than criticise them—a treasure you have long ago learned the value of. I wish I had been as fortunate. To labor to secure the world’s pl praise Ⓐemendationor its blame either, seems stale, flat & unprofitable,4explanatory note compared with the happiness of achieving the praise or the abuse of a so dear a friend as a wife.

God bless old Bart, I do hope he will come out strong & hearty again.5explanatory note

I have been thinking of school-days Ⓐemendationat Dawson’s, & trying to recall the old faces of that ancient time—but I cannot place them very well—they have g Ⓐemendationfaded out from my treacherous memory, for the most part, & passed away. But I still remember the louse you bought of poor Arch Fuqua. I told about that at a Congressional dinner in Washington the other day, & Lord, how those thieves laughed! It was a gorgeous old reminiscence. I just expect I shall publish it yet, some day.6explanatory note

But I have a dozen more letters to write, & time presses.

Goodbye, old shipmate.