It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but then it was not a great deal of money.  The Review was as poor as it was proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper.  But this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a dollar a thousand words.  However, I was richly content with that, and would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London.  They had consented to look at it to oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it.  They answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand, at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred copies.  When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer, try to get some other London house to publish my book.  They said Yes, almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about.  At most places they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.  The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction, never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering times.  I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally agreed to take those five hundred copies.  This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and Cambridge.  We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of a friendship which lasts to this day.  But it was not till some months later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.  I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter anyway.  I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the truth I had not much myself.  But the book had an instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edition ever since.  There was just then the interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the English.  Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book.  There were long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.