some extent.  But what should I do with Number Five?  The reader must follow out her career for himself.  For myself, I think that she and the Tutor have both utterly forgotten the difference of their years in the fascination of intimate intercourse.  I do not believe that a nature so large, so rich in affection, as Number Five’s is going to fall defeated of its best inheritance of life, like a vine which finds no support for its tendrils to twine around, and so creeps along the ground from which nature meant that love should lift it.  I feel as if I ought to follow these two personages of my sermonizing story until they come together or separate, to fade, to wither,—­perhaps to die, at last, of something like what the doctors call heart-failure, but which might more truly be called heart-starvation.  When I say die, I do not mean necessarily the death that goes into the obituary column.  It may come to that, in one or both; but I think that, if they are never united, Number Five will outlive the Tutor, who will fall into melancholy ways, and pine and waste, while she lives along, feeling all the time that she has cheated herself of happiness.  I hope that is not going to be their fortune, or misfortune.  Vieille fille fait jeune mariee.  What a youthful bride Number Five would be, if she could only make up her mind to matrimony!  In the mean time she must be left with her lambs all around her.  May heaven temper the winds to them, for they have been shorn very close, every one of them, of their golden fleece of aspirations and anticipations.

I must avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words to my distant friends who take interest enough in my writings, early or recent, to wish to enter into communication with me by letter, or to keep up a communication already begun.  I have given notice in print that the letters, books, and manuscripts which I receive by mail are so numerous that if I undertook to read and answer them all I should have little time for anything else.  I have for some years depended on the assistance of a secretary, but our joint efforts have proved unable, of late, to keep down the accumulations which come in with every mail.  So many of the letters I receive are of a pleasant character that it is hard to let them go unacknowledged.  The extreme friendliness which pervades many of them gives them a value which I rate very highly.  When large numbers of strangers insist on claiming one as a friend, on the strength of what he has written, it tends to make him think of himself somewhat indulgently.  It is the most natural thing in the world to want to give expression to the feeling the loving messages from far-off unknown friends must excite.  Many a day has had its best working hours broken into, spoiled for all literary work, by the labor of answering correspondents whose good opinion it is gratifying to have called forth, but who were unconsciously laying a new burden on shoulders already aching.  I know too well that