salvation from a good deal of nonsense incident to the situation.

I have been told that the American circulation of the book, which has
remained below one hundred thousand, was rather more than that in Great
Britain. Translations, of course, were manifold. The French, the German,
the Dutch, the Italian have been conscientiously sent to the author;
some others, I think, have not. More applications to republish my books
have reached me from Germany than from any other country. For a while,
with the tenderness of a novice in such experience, I kept all these
foreign curiosities on my book-shelves; but the throes of several New
England "movings" have scattered their ashes.

Not long ago I came across a tiny pamphlet in which I used to feel more
honest pride than in any edition of "The Gates Ajar" which it has ever
been my fortune to handle. It is a sickly yellow thing, covered with a
coarse design of some kind, in which the wings of a particularly sprawly
angel predominate.

The print is abhorrent, and the paper such as any respectable publisher
would prepare to be condemned for in this world and in that to come. In
fact, the entire book was thus given out by one of the most enterprising
of English pirates, as an advertisement for a patent medicine. I have
never traced the chemical history of the drug; but it has pleased my
fancy to suppose it to be the one in which Mrs. Holt, the mother of
Felix, dealt so largely; and whose sale Felix put forth his mighty
conscience to suppress.

Of course, owing to the state of our copyright laws at that time, all
this foreign publication was piratical; and most of it brought no
visible consequence to the author, beyond that cold tribute to personal