MR. WHITE,--It is a long time since I threw my mite into the treasury of your book; Nugator's occupation's gone! was my ejaculation when last I wrote to you. The same devouring element which has recently plunged New York in misery and gloom, had just then triumphed over much of my earthly possessions, but over none more foolishly prized than sundry small wares which were intended for your market. As there was no prospect of getting Congress to extend the time of the payment of _my bonds_, to which one would think I was as justly entitled as the rich merchant, I had to set to work as best I might to repair the ravages of fire. In the midst of saws and hammers, of bricks and mortar, my ideas have been so vulgarized, that you must not expect to see a Phoenix rise from my ashes. From me you must never expect any thing but trifles, as my signature portends; yet when I reflect that this world is made up of small things as well as great, and that the former are as essential to constitute a whole as the latter, and that your book ought no more than the world to consist altogether of the grand, but should sometimes admit the trifling, I am encouraged to begin again, although already scorched by more fires than one, having encountered the fire of some of your critics. As the mouse sets off to greater advantage the bulk of the mammoth, the critics should rather be pleased than otherwise, to see my wretched skeleton in contrast with the vast proportions of some of your contributors,--but enough. Romances and novels made my neighbor Castellanus a castle-builder; nothing can be more dissimilar than the world he inhabits and that ideal one in which he has always lived; like certain persons who shall be nameless, he has been literally _in_ the world and _out_ of it at the same time, and his experience therefore might justify a seeming paradox. I think it was Godwin in his Fleetwood, who drew so beautiful a contrast between our _night_ dreams and _day_ dreams. Castellanus never could bear the former, attended by hag and night mare, where we are forever struggling to attain some goal, which we can never reach; he did not like to start affrighted out of sleep; to sink through chasms yawning beneath his feet; "Nor toss on shatter'd plank far out upon some deep."