Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over, to know if it could be really so. So it really was. His book had disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet the ground and never germinate disappear. At last it had got a certain value as a curiosity for book-hunters. Some one of them, keener-eyed than the rest, had seen that there was a meaning and virtue in this unsuccessful book, for which there was a new audience educated since it had tried to breathe before its time. Out of this had grown at last the publisher's proposal. It was too much: his heart swelled with joy, and his eyes filled with tears. How could he resist the temptation? He took down his own particular copy of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and began reading. As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he nodded approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out, he condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was written, and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval. The reader may like a few specimens from this early edition, now a rarity. He shall have them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments. The book, as its name implied, contained "Thoughts" rather than consecutive trains of reasoning or continuous disquisitions. What he read and remarked upon were a few of the more pointed statements which stood out in the chapters he was turning over. The worth of the book must not be judged by these almost random specimens. "_The best thought, like the most perfect digestion, is done unconsciously._--Develop that--Ideas at compound interest in the mind.--Be aye sticking in _an idea_,--while you're sleeping it'll be growing. Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten years from now, etc.--Article by and by for the.... "_Can the Infinite be supposed to shift the responsibility of the ultimate destiny of any created thing to the finite? Our theologians pretend that it can. I doubt._--Heretical. _Stet._ "_Protestantism means None of your business. But it is afraid of its own logic._--_Stet._ No logical resting-place short of None of your business. "_The supreme self-indulgence is to surrender the will to a spiritual director._--Protestantism gave up a great luxury.--Did it, though? "_Asiatic modes of thought and speech do not express the relations in which the American feels himself to stand to his Superiors in this or any other sphere of being. Republicanism must have its own religious phraseology, which is not that borrowed from Oriental despotisms._ "_Idols and dogmas in place of character; pills and theories in place of wholesome living. See the histories of theology and medicine_ passim.--Hits 'em. "'_Of such is the kingdom of heaven.' Do you mean to say, Jean Chauvin, that_ _'Heaven_ LIES _about us in our infancy'?_