My Dear Sir,--I am much obliged to you for communicating to us (that is, to my daughters and myself) the engraved portrait, enlarged from the daguerreotype original. The engraver, at least, seems to have done his part ably. As to one of the earlier artists concerned, viz. the sun of July, I suppose it is not allowable to complain of _him_, else my daughters are inclined to upbraid him with having made the mouth too long. But, of old, it was held audacity to suspect the sun's veracity:--'Solem quis dicere falsum audeat!' And I remember that, half a century ago, the _Sun_ newspaper, in London, used to fight under sanction of that motto. But it was at length discovered by the learned, that Sun _junior_, viz. the newspaper, _did_ sometimes indulge in fibbing. The ancient prejudice about the solar truth broke down, therefore, in that instance; and who knows but Sun _senior_ may be detected, now that our optical glasses are so much improved, in similar practices? in which case he may have only been 'keeping his hand in' when operating upon that one feature of the mouth. The rest of the portrait, we all agree, does credit to his talents, showing that he is still wide-awake, and not at all the superannuated old artist that some speculators in philosophy had dreamed of his becoming. As an accompaniment to this portrait, your wish is that I should furnish a few brief chronological memoranda of my own life. _That_ would be hard for me to do, and _when_ done, might not be very interesting for others to read. Nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arrayed, of inevitable facts in a man's life. One is so certain of the man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to lie under the necessity of reading it. That the man began by being a boy--that he went to school--and that, by intense application to his studies, 'which he took to be _his_ portion in this life,' he rose to distinction as a robber of orchards, seems so probable, upon the whole, that I am willing to accept it as a postulate. That he married--that, in fulness of time, he was hanged, or (being a humble, unambitious man) that he was content with deserving it--these little circumstances are so naturally to be looked for, as sown broadcast up and down the great fields of biography, that any one life becomes, in this respect, but the echo of thousands. Chronologic successions of events and dates, such as these, which, belonging to the race, illustrate nothing in the individual, are as wearisome as they are useless.