Prescott's letters with a fine-tooth comb, there still remain enough of these Doric gems to make us wish that all of them had been retained. It is interesting to find the author of so many volumes of stately and ornate narration letting himself go in private life, and dropping into such easy phrases as "whopper-jawed," "cotton to," "quiddle," "book up," "crack up," "podder" (a favourite word of his), and "slosh." He retained all of a young man's delight in his own convivial feats, and we find him in one of his letters, after describing a rather prolonged and complicated entertainment, asking gleefully, "Am I not a fast boy?" His Yankee phrases were the hall-mark of his Yankee nature. Old England, with all its beauty of landscape and its exquisite finish, never drove New England from his head or heart. Thus, on his third visit to England, he wrote to his wife: "I came through the English garden,--lawns of emerald green, winding streams, light arched bridges, long lines stretching between hedges of hawthorn all flowering; rustic cottages, lordly mansions, and sweeping woods--the whole landscape a miracle of beauty." And then he adds: "I would have given something to see a ragged fence, or an old stump, or a bit of rock, or even a stone as big as one's fist, to show that man's hand had not been combing Nature's head so vigorously. I felt I was not in my own dear, wild America." Prescott was a true Yankee also in the carefulness of his attention to matters of business. He did not value money for its own sake. His father had left him a handsome competence. He spent freely both for himself and for his friends; but none the less, he made the most minute notes of all his publishing ventures and analysed the publishers' returns as carefully as though he were a professional accountant. This was due in part, no doubt, to a natural desire to measure the popularity of his books by the standard of financial success. He certainly had no reason to be dissatisfied. Up to the time of his death, of the _Ferdinand and Isabella_ there had been sold in the United States and England nearly eighteen thousand copies; of the _Conquest of Mexico_, twenty-four thousand copies; and of the _Conquest of Peru_, seventeen thousand copies--a total, for the three works, of nearly sixty thousand copies. When we remember that each of these histories was in several volumes and was expensively printed and bound, and that the reading public was much smaller in those days than now, this is a very remarkable showing for three serious historical works. Since his death, the sales have grown greater with the increase of general readers and the lapse of the American copyright Prescott made excellent terms with his publishers, as has already been recorded, and if a decision of the House of Lords had been favourable to his copyright in England, his literary gains in that country would have been still larger.[16]