The print of my remembrance Author:Augustus Thomas Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MY INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON A powerful publisher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when he knew I planned to write these recollections, sent a word of c... more »aution to me by a friend. He didn't come himself. A rash or inexperienced or undiplomatic publisher, seeing a sign, "Angels Wanted," might have rushed in; but knowing that Napoleon even in his highest power sent M. de Narbonne to represent him at Vienna, this prudent printer, moving by indirection, said to his ambassador, "Tell Thomas to raise a mustache in his story as soon as possible." By which he meant, get through with his boyish memories briefly. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, one morning in 1858, said to his fellow boarders: "My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown, homely growth; you may cast it away as worthless. And yet—and yet it is something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his hands. You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors. I am uncovering one of these caches." Some day when my Philadelphia friend outgrows his timidity he and I will meet, and not chiding him openlyfor this threatened surrender to the material rush of his generation and his calling, I shall say: "Is your great paper, founded by a great, unhurried American philosopher, read principally in subways and on commutation trains or in simple households after nightfall, with mother and the children near the lamps? And what are the pass...« less