Page:Letters of Life.djvu/345

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LITERATURE.
333

1833.

11. "How to be Happy."

Still keeping in view the nurture of children, I prepared a small work of one hundred and twenty-six pages, with the above title, pointing out a variety of ways in which they might find satisfaction by being good and obedient. Another motive animated me. The former scholars, whom I had so much loved, had many of them become mothers. The second generation was nearly as numerous as the first. For the nineteenth time they were about to assemble on the 1st of August—that day of the commencement of the school, which their constancy had continued to embalm. I knew they would appear under the same green trees where their youth had gathered, leading miniatures of themselves. I wished to place in those little hands some useful gift, which, if death should divide me from them before the twentieth anniversary, might be a memorial of affection. In ten days, and without previous preparation, I wrote this book, and gave it to a publisher—the late excellent Mr. D. F. Robinson. To my surprise, he proceeded to issue several thousand; according me the remuneration of ten per cent, on the retail price, with twenty-five copies of every new edition for my own gratuitous distribution.