the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would
acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended.
I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New
York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter
written in May, with the four copies of the _Sartor,_ which by a
strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the
Custom-House. On such provocation I can sit still no longer.

------------
* The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of
_Philothea_ was published in this year, 1835.

"If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen."

says Lowell, in his _Fable for Critics._
-----------

The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse
on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord*
(my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the
third, my marriage, now happily consummated. All three, from the
least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to
leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big
enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information.
Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to
show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not
dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you
have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house,
waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but