I record here and now what I did not know in the spring-tide of my happiness. I never had—I shall never have—another reader like him. As long as he lived, he “believed” in me and in my work with a sincerity and fervor as impossible for me to describe as it can be for any outsider to believe. He made the perusal of each volume (and they numbered a score before he died) as solemn a ceremony as he instituted for the first. His absolute absorption in it was the secret jest of the family, but they respected it at heart. When he talked with me of the characters that bore part in my stories, he treated them as real flesh-and-blood entities. He found fault with one, and sympathized with another, and argued with a third, as seeing them in _propia personæ_. It was strange—phenomenal—when one considers the light weight of the literature under advisement and the mental calibre of the man. To me it was at once inspiration and my exceeding great reward. “_June 5th, 1854._ “DEAR EFFIE,—From a formidable pile of letters of good wishes and congratulation, I select (not _happen_ upon!) your sweet, affectionate epistle, every word of which, if it did not come from your heart, went straight to mine. “I shall never be a literary iceberg! That is clear. I have had a surfeit of compliments in public and in private, but a word of appreciation from a true, loving friend gives me more delicious pleasure than all else. “I make no excuse for speaking freely to you of what you say is ‘near akin’ to you. I thank you heartily for owning the relationship. Two editions have been ‘run off’ already, and another is now in press—unprecedented success in this part of the world—or so they tell me. Northern papers notice the book more at length and more handsomely than does the Richmond press. “Of the sales in your county, I know nothing. Oh yes! C. W. told Mr. Rhodes that ‘Miss Virginia Hawes’s novel is having a tremendous run in Powhatan. Tre-_men_-dous, sir! Why, I had an order to buy a copy and send it up, myself, sir!’ “Isn’t that characteristic?” XXV BROUGHT FACE TO FACE WITH MY FATE THE promised visit to Powhatan was paid in July. “How happily the days of Thalaba went by!”