Then it was the pictures
that did not change which fretted me; with a cold chill I knew I
had been lost, and went back and finished the speech. No one was
any the wiser, apparently. But I was glad when, the following week,
I wrote the last page in my book. That night, my wife insists,
I deliberately turned a somersault on the parlor carpet while the
big children cheered and the baby looked on, wide-eyed, from her
high chair.
I preserve among my cherished treasures two letters of that period
from James Russell Lowell. In one of them he gives me permission to
use the verses with which I prefaced the book. They were the text
from which I preached my sermon. He writes that he is "glad they
have so much life left in them after forty years." But those verses
will never die. They tell in a few lines all I tried to tell on
three hundred pages. The other letter was written when he had read
the book. I reproduce it here.
[Illustration: Mr. Lowell's Letter.]
For myself I have never been able to satisfactorily explain the
great run "How the Other Half Lives" had.
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