I have just received your letter, dated the--wait a minute till I look--the 17th Sept. Long while ago, isn't it? Do you remember what you wrote about? I never do; and it seems most extraordinary in reading your letters referring to ones I have written about a month ago, that though I know you are answering them, I don't understand what you are talking about the least in the world. I don't want to discourage you, you know. Your letters are rather enhanced in value by their riddle-like quotations. They make me wonder what on earth I can have been writing about. I do not even remember, unless you tell me, whether they were long or short; and, except for my consciousness of never having written in a strain of trifling or levity, or otherwise than in a manner calculated to elevate and improve the minds of everyone but my hearers, I should be almost led to think I had been guilty of excesses in the way of toast-water or gruel previous to writing them (tea-totaller you see). Put it to yourself now. Wouldn't you feel riled if somebody said, in a long commendatory sort of letter to yourself, that your description of so and so was very funny? or that somebody else laughed very much at your whole letter, when you felt certain that the letter in question must have been a well thought out essay on the subject. "Did Socrates ever stand on his head? and if so, upon which end of him did it grow?" Wouldn't it be matter for despair to feed his remorseless eye teeth upon, to find that the highest flights of your intellect were capable only of a jocular interpretation? But I feel certain there must be a mistake somewhere. As I said before, I am fortified with the comfortable assurance of the integrity of my heart in wishing to write only what will feed the hungry mind. By-the-bye, if Socrates ever did stand on the upside down end, he had excellent authority in justification of his action, for Pot, the Patentee, has been known to do likewise. I've only had two pipes to-day, mother; or three, is it--I forget; call it two. Justice, tempered with mercy, &c., which means that I'll have another now. That's the thing for ideas! Oh, certainly. Picture to yourself an editor writing like mad. He indulges in a pipe to soothe his rampant brain, and while lighting it he leans back for a complacent yawn. When he gets up again, his dominant idea is that the back of his chair must have been suffering from a diseased spine. Isn't that a striking picture? The earth hitting a poor man on the back of his head, eh? Well, it's quite a true one, and the incidents it portrays are also of recent occurrence. The weary editor represents me; the earth represents--hooray--a feather bed, which heroically interposes its devoted body between me and the belligerent planet. Every detail you can con (I don't know how to spell conjure) up will represent the scene true to the life in everything save the attitude and gestures of the falling literary warrior. Nothing you could imagine