Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page; on these we are now printing. My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones. Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third, finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of alternating between the other two. This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large. The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse sense does; every _fixed_ idea, such as rules every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long, fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![33]