The easy _dégagé_ air of his writing was, as is usually the case with seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copy _must_ be followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends, “probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips, “which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business association.” “I would not stay one week a partner with a man who ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr. Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper, never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation. He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,--not to say reckless,--and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first to praise them, and to give circulation to their good things by copying them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich--who succeeded James Parton as assistant editor of the “Home Journal”--and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the “Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when