Bringing home copious materials for the work, he wrote the “Nile Notes of a Howadji,” which the Harpers promptly accepted and published in 1851, the author being then twenty-seven. It is interesting to observe that he never went through that period of struggle to which most young writers must submit; a fact presaging the almost unbroken success of his later career. His other two books of travel appeared the next year, and at the same time he began to divide with Donald G. Mitchell the writing of the “Easy Chair” in _Harper’s Monthly_, which he afterward took wholly upon himself and continued until his death. His connection with _Harper’s Weekly_ began in 1857, and for six years he supplied a series of papers entitled “The Lounger” to that periodical. In 1863 he became its political editor. Meanwhile he had published “The Potiphar Papers,” the one successful satire on social New York since Irving’s “Salmagundi”; also “Prue and I,” and “Trumps,” his only attempt at a novel. This, too, treats of New York life. Finally he married, in 1856, and settled on Staten Island, where he lived until he died in 1892, in a house only a few rods distant from that in which he was married. Yet, New Yorker as he was by long association, residence and interest, he had a close relationship with Massachusetts; partly through his marriage into a Massachusetts family of note--the Shaws; partly, perhaps, through the ties formed in those idyllic days at Brook Farm and Concord. And in Massachusetts he had another home, at Ashfield, to which he repaired every summer. It is an old farm-house on the outskirts of the village, which lies among beautiful maple-clad hills, between the Berkshire valley and the picturesque neighborhood of the Deerfields and Northampton. A number of years ago, with his friend Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Curtis aided in founding a library for Ashfield, and he was so much of a favorite with his neighbors there, that they were anxious to make him their representative in Congress. He, however, seemed to prefer their friendship, and the glorious colors of their autumn woods, to their votes. Throughout the greater part of the fierce presidential campaign of 1884 Mr. Curtis conducted his voluminous work as editor and as independent chieftain in this quiet retreat. In 1875 it was to him that Concord turned when seeking an orator for the centenary of her famous “Fight”; and it was he again whom Boston, in the spring of 1883, invited to pronounce the eulogy upon Wendell Phillips. These are rather striking instances of Massachusetts dependence on a New York author and orator, discrepant from a theory which makes the dependence all the other way.