I have been absent in New York and Hartford for the past ten or twelve days & was glad to find your letter when I got back. It was with 28 others—the other 27 are not answered. I have written 182 note-paper pages of newspaper matter, at a dollar a page, & 7 of magazine stuff at four dollars a page, in the last two days—Oh, no,—I aint a steam engine to work, when I get behindhand, I don’t reckon—“it’s the man in the wagon,”Ⓐemendation as we say in California.2explanatory note If I can write as much more in the next two days, I will be all right again. I just want to show them that when I make contracts I am willing to fill them—& then I will throw up all my correspondence except about $75 a week & sail in on my book—because I have made a tip-top, splendid contract with a great publishing house in Hartford for a 600-page volume illustrated—about the size of a Patent Office Report. My percentage is a fifth more than any they have ever paid any man but Horace Greeley—I get what amounts to just about the same he was paid. But this is publishers’ secret—keep it to yourself.

I wish I could see you & talk over old times. Give my love to your 5,3explanatory note my dear old boy. I must write & answer some of those other letters. Good bye, lad. drawing of treble clef with two measures from “Auld Lang Syne”? Here’s a health & a green memory to the days that are gone!