"Pull Beelzebub's tail for me," he writes. But the following
from Boston, February 15, 1836, gives the more serious side of the
situation:--
"I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me
forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from
one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I
have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going
near him ... I don't feel at all obliged to him about the editorship,
for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company; ... and I
defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars what I do for five
hundred."
Goodrich afterward sent his editor a small sum; and the relations
between them were resumed.. A letter of May 5, in the same year,
contains these allusions:--
"I saw Mr. Goodrich yesterday.... He wants me to undertake a Universal
History, to contain about as much as fifty or sixty pages of the
magazine. [These were large pages.] If you are willing to write any part
of it, ... I shall agree to do it. If necessary I will come home by and
by, and concoct the plan of it with you. It need not be superior in
profundity and polish to the middling magazine articles.... I shall have
nearly a dozen articles in The Token,--mostly quite short."
The historical project is, of course, that which resulted in the famous
"Peter Parley" work. "Our pay as historians of the universe," says a
letter written six days later, "will be about one hundred dollars, the
whole of which you may have.
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