Italy behind us, a new sense as of a hidden treasure in life--of
something sweet and inexhaustible always waiting for one's return; like
a child's cake in a cupboard, or the gold and silver hoard of Odysseus
that Athene helped him to hide in the Ithacan cave.

Then one day toward the end of June or the beginning of July my husband
put down beside me a great brown paper package which the post had just
brought. "There's America beginning!" he said, and we turned over the
contents of the parcel in bewilderment. A kind American friend had made
a collection for me of the reviews, sermons, and pamphlets that had been
published so far about the book in the States, the correspondences, the
odds and ends of all kinds, grave and gay. Every mail, moreover, began
to bring me American letters from all parts of the States. "No book
since _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ has had so sudden and wide a diffusion among
all classes of readers," wrote an American man of letters, "and I
believe that no other book of equal seriousness ever had so quick a
hearing. I have seen it in the hands of nursery-maids and of shopgirls
behind the counters; of frivolous young women who read every novel that
is talked about; of business men, professors, and students.... The
proprietors of those large shops where anything--from a pin to a
piano--can be bought, vie with each other in selling the cheapest
edition. One pirate put his price even so low as four cents--two pence!"
(Those, it will be remembered, were the days before Anglo-American
copyright.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, to whom I was personally a stranger, wrote to me
just such a letter as one might have dreamed of from the "Autocrat":
"One of my elderly friends of long ago called a story of mine you may
possibly have heard of--_Elsie Venner_--'a medicated novel,' and such
she said she was not in the habit of reading. I liked her expression; it