P.S.-I have written this by a light so dim that you nor Ma could not
read by it.  Write, and let me know how Henry is.

It is a good letter; it is direct and clear in its descriptive quality, and it gives us a scale of things.  Double the population of Hannibal visited the Crystal Palace in one day! and the water to supply the city came a distance of thirty-eight miles!  Doubtless these were amazing statistics.

Then there was the interest in family affairs—­always strong—­his concern for Henry, whom he loved tenderly; his memory of the promise to his mother; his understanding of her craving to visit her old home.  He did not write to her direct, for the reason that Orion’s plans were then uncertain, and it was not unlikely that he had already found a new location.  From this letter, too, we learn that the boy who detested school was reveling in a library of four thousand books—­more than he had ever seen together before.  We have somehow the feeling that he had all at once stepped from boyhood to manhood, and that the separation was marked by a very definite line.

The work he had secured was in Cliff Street in the printing establishment of John A. Gray & Green, who agreed to pay him four dollars a week, and did pay that amount in wildcat money, which saved them about twenty-five per cent. of the sum.  He lodged at a mechanics’ boarding-house in Duane Street, and when he had paid his board and washing he sometimes had as much as fifty cents to lay away.

He did not like the board.  He had been accustomed to the Southern mode of cooking, and wrote home complaining that New-Yorkers did not have “hot-bread” or biscuits, but ate “light-bread,” which they allowed to get stale, seeming to prefer it in that way.  On the whole, there was not much inducement to remain in New York after he had satisfied himself with its wonders.  He lingered, however, through the hot months of 1853, and found it not easy to go.  In October he wrote to Pamela, suggesting plans for Orion; also for Henry and Jim Wolfe, whom he seems never to have overlooked.  Among other things he says: 

I have not written to any of the family for some time, from the fact, firstly, that I didn’t know where they were, and, secondly, because I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York every day for the last two weeks.  I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause.  I think I shall get off Tuesday, though.

Edwin Forrest has been playing for the last sixteen days at the Broadway Theater, but I never went to see him till last night.  The play was the “Gladiator.”  I did not like parts of it much, but other portions were really splendid.  In the latter part of the last act, where the “Gladiator” (Forrest) dies at his brother’s feet (in all the fierce pleasure of gratified revenge), the man’s whole