“And the duties are pleasant. I am not to have anything to do with teaching, as Longfellow had, but only to deliver two courses of lectures in the year--on pretty much any subject I choose, and my salary is to be $1200.00. “Everybody seems pleased. My first thought was a sad one, for the heart that would have beat warmest is still. Then I thought of my father, and then of you. I think it will be all the better for Mabel that I should have enough to live on, without being forced to write, and I shall have time enough after the first year to do pretty much what I like.... “My lectures have succeeded quite beyond my expectation. One or two have been pretty good, but I have felt sad in writing them, and somehow feel as if I had not got _myself_ into them very much. However, folks are pleased.” Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him invitations to go elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid, and the three fish-tails again--well, it is not delightful exactly.”