administration.

Any man who holds a place here, now, stands prepared at all times to
vacate it. You are doing, now, exactly what I wanted you to do a year
ago.

We chase phantoms half the days of our lives.

It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.

I am in for it. I must go on chasing them until I marry--then I am done
with literature and all other bosh,--that is, literature wherewith to
please the general public.

I shall write to please myself, then. I hope you will set type till you
complete that invention, for surely government pap must be nauseating
food for a man--a man whom God has enabled to saw wood and be
independent. It really seemed to me a falling from grace, the idea of
going back to San Francisco nothing better than a mere postmaster, albeit
the public would have thought I came with gilded honors, and in great
glory.

I only retain correspondence enough, now, to make a living for myself,
and have discarded all else, so that I may have time to spare for the
book. Drat the thing, I wish it were done, or that I had no other
writing to do.

This is the place to get a poor opinion of everybody in. There isn't one
man in Washington, in civil office, who has the brains of Anson
Burlingame--and I suppose if China had not seized and saved his great