Well, Pamela, after thinking it over for a day or so, I came near inquiring about a state-room in our ship for Sam, to please you, but my wiser former resolution came back to me.  It is not for his good that he have friends in the ship.  His conduct in the Bacon business shows that he will develop rapidly into a manly man as soon as he is cast loose from your apron strings.

You don’t teach him to push ahead and do and dare things for himself, but you do just the reverse.  You are assisted in your damaging work by the tyrannous ways of a village—­villagers watch each other and so make cowards of each other.  After Sam shall have voyaged to Europe by himself, and rubbed against the world and taken and returned its cuffs, do you think he will hesitate to escort a guest into any whisky-mill in Fredonia when he himself has no sinful business to transact there?  No, he will smile at the idea.  If he avoids this courtesy now from principle, of course I find no fault with it at all—­only if he thinks it is principle he may be mistaken; a close examination may show it is only a bowing to the tyranny of public opinion.

I only say it may—­I cannot venture to say it will.  Hartford is not a large place, but it is broader than to have ways of that sort.  Three or four weeks ago, at a Moody and Sankey meeting, the preacher read a letter from somebody “exposing” the fact that a prominent clergyman had gone from one of those meetings, bought a bottle of lager beer and drank it on the premises (a drug store.)

A tempest of indignation swept the town.  Our clergymen and everybody else said the “culprit” had not only done an innocent thing, but had done it in an open, manly way, and it was nobody’s right or business to find fault with it.  Perhaps this dangerous latitude comes of the fact that we never have any temperance “rot” going on in Hartford.

I find here a letter from Orion, submitting some new matter in his story for criticism.  When you write him, please tell him to do the best he can and bang away.  I can do nothing further in this matter, for I have but 3 days left in which to settle a deal of important business and answer a bushel and a half of letters.  I am very nearly tired to death.

I was so jaded and worn, at the Taylor dinner, that I found I could not remember 3 sentences of the speech I had memorized, and therefore got up and said so and excused myself from speaking.  I arrived here at 3 o’clock this morning.  I think the next 3 days will finish me.  The idea of sitting down to a job of literary criticism is simply ludicrous.

A young lady passenger in our ship has been placed under Livy’s charge.  Livy couldn’t easily get out of it, and did not want to, on her own account, but fully expected I would make trouble when I heard of it.  But I didn’t.  A girl can’t well travel alone, so I offered no objection.  She leaves us at Hamburg.  So I’ve got 6 people in my care, now—­which is just 6 too many for a man of my unexecutive capacity.  I expect nothing else but to lose some of them overboard.