I'll tell you what let's do! Set up a partnership, you to run around and attend to the patients while I will stay at home and, reading everything imaginable in English, German, and French, distil it in a concentrated form into your mind. This division of labor will give the firm an immense advantage over all of our wooden-headed contemporaries. For, in your person, it will have more experience than any one else has time to acquire; and in mine, more learning. We will divide the profits equally, of course; and he who survives the other (you, probably) will inherit the whole. Does not the idea tempt you? If you don't like it, I'll go you halves in the profits in any other feasible way. Seriously, you see I have no very definite plans for the future; but I have enough to keep body and soul together for some years to come, and I see no need of providing for more. This talk of course is only for your "private ear." I want you to write immediately on receipt of this,--for if you don't then, you never will,--and tell me all about what you've been doing and learning and what your future plans are. Also, gossip about the School and Hospital. I have not had a chance to talk medicine with any one but Dwight and Tuck (for a week), and hunger thereafter.... Believe me, ever til deth, your friend WM. JAMES. T. S. Perry of '66, who lives with me here, reminds me of a story to tell you. He lived with Architect Ware in Paris, and Ware received a visit from Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Dixwell last summer. The concierge woman was terribly impressed by the personal majesty of your uncles, particularly of Dr. Bowditch, of whom she said: "Il a le grand air, tout à fait comme Christophe Colomb!" It would be curious to understand exactly who and what she thought C. C. was, or whether she would have thought Mr. Dixwell like Americus Vespucius if she had known _him_. _To O. W. Holmes, Jr._ BERLIN, _Jan. 3, 1868_.