I never had any report of the book's sales, but I believe my _Life of Lincoln_ sold very well in the West, though in the East it was forestalled by the books of writers better known. In the quiet which followed with a business which is always tending to quiescence (if the mood of the trade when discouraging authors may be trusted) my young publisher suggested my taking one hundred and seventy-five dollars of my money, and going to Canada and New England and New York on a sort of roving commission for another work he had imagined. It was to be a subscription book reporting the state and describing the operation of the principal manufacturing industries, and he thought it an enterprise peculiarly suited to my powers. I did not think so, but I was eager to see the world, especially the world of Boston, and I gladly took my hundred and seventy-five dollars and started, intending to do my best for the enterprise, though inwardly abhorring it. The best I could do was to try seeing the inner working of an iron foundry in Portland, where I was suspected of designs upon the proprietorial processes and refused admission; and I made no attempt to surprise the secrets of other manufacturers. But I saw Niagara Falls, which did not withhold its glories from me in fear of the publicity which I gave them in my letters to the Cincinnati _Gazette_; and I saw the St. Lawrence River and Montreal and Quebec, with the _habitant_ villages round about them. I also saw the ocean at Portland (not so jealous of its mysteries as the iron foundry); I saw Boston and Cambridge, and Lowell and Holmes, and their publisher, Fields; I saw New York and Walt Whitman, and the Hudson River. This has been fully told in my _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, and need not be told again here; but what may be fittingly set down is that when I arrived home in Columbus I found the publishing business still quieter than I had left it, and my friend with no enterprise in hand which I could help him bring to a successful or even unsuccessful issue. In fact he had nothing for me to do in that hour of mounting political excitement, and this did not surprise me. Neither did it surprise me that my old chief of the _State Journal_ should ask me to rejoin him, though it did greatly rejoice me. He was yet in that kind illusion of his that he was working too hard on the paper; he expressed his fear that in the demand made upon his time by public affairs he should not be able to give it the attention he would like, and he proposed that I should return to a wider field in it, on an increased wage; he also intimated that he should now be able to bring up my arrears of salary, and he quite presently did so.