“I have but just received your letter, dear friend of by-gone days, and believe me, it has given me no little satisfaction to think that you remember me, and with interest still. I am inclined to laugh, and weep, and wonder, when I think of myself as I was in the days long ago, when we lived among you so very poor and dependent; but there is a feeling of gratitude living in my heart stronger than every other emotion now excited in my breast by the freshened remembrance of my old home. “You ask me to tell you what I have been doing, and wish to know under what name I have immortalized myself. You will not believe I left behind me all my ambitious desires when we made our abode here in the west! Have you ever chanced to hear of ——? It is the name I chose to adopt in my appearance before the public. Perhaps you may have seen it, and read verses accompanying it, but I am confident you never recognized in those merry strains the voice and the heart-tune of your once poverty-stricken and desponding friend.” (The reader may imagine my astonishment and amaze on reading these words—for my correspondent, Lily Reeve, was none other than one of the most beloved and popular of writers!) “I feel conversational to-day, besides, I know it is but just to assure those who were so generous in my days of adversity, that their money and sympathy were not altogether thrown away. I was very far from being forgetful of those who in my earlier years rendered me such efficient and valuable aid; but I thought it better even at the risk of being esteemed ungrateful, to be unknown to them and to you, until I should be able to reflect some little credit upon them. I shall soon publish a book which is dedicated to those friends of former days, through that I hope to relieve myself from any charge of forgetfulness or coldness they may have justly brought against me. “It is only ten years since we first made our home in this western world; but I have grown gray in feeling since then, and looking back into my childhood, the road to it seems to be one of interminable length. Decidedly as our fortunes have brightened, we have had our struggles and heart-sorrows here also; and we have had much of sickness too, which seems to await almost every settler in the west; but there is so much more for which we have occasion to be thankful, that it seems almost a sin even to revert to our first trials and vexations. My mother, thank Heaven! now that she is old, may rest; her latter years are not harassed with the thoughts of a dependent, impoverished family; my brothers are in a way, all of them, to support themselves, and my young sisters are being educated in such a way that they will never have to rely on others for their support. And for all this I pray we may be ever thankful as we ought.