In time, but I do not know how long time, for such things did not interest me, though I was doing my share in helping pay off our debt, the promissory notes which my father had given for the purchase of our newspaper were taken up, and the newspaper was also our property. Nobody could molest us or make us afraid in its possession; and in my hope of other things it did not concern me that the title vested in his partnership with my brother, who had most justly earned his half, and who by an enterprise of his own finally established the family fortunes in undreamed-of prosperity. It was characteristic of my father that as long as their partnership existed there were no accounts between them; after my brother had a family of his own each drew from the common income at his wish or need, and when I came of sufficient worldly wisdom to realize the risks to their peace from this anomalous arrangement, I protested against it in vain. They agreed with me that it was precarious and in a way ridiculous, and that it certainly ought to cease, but as long as they continued together they remained partners on these terms. After my father withdrew, my brother took his own son into partnership, and when he came in his turn to retire, he contritely owned to me that they had not departed from the same old unbusiness-like community of ways and means, though he had promised me very earnestly many times to end it. While I am upon these matters it is a pleasure for me to record that when I came home from Venice with the manuscript of _Venetian Life_ promised publication by a London house if I could find an American house to take half the proposed edition, and I confessed that I had very little hope of getting this taken in New York or Boston, my brother promptly offered to take it himself. He was then in that undreamed-of prosperity which I have mentioned, and though he had no expectation of becoming a book-publisher, he was very willing to incur the risks involved. As all my world knows, the book found an equally courageous friend in New York, and came out with the American imprint of Hurd & Houghton instead of Joseph A. Howells & Co.
It is not surprising to me that I cannot date the time of our acquiring the newspaper, free and clear, as the real-estate phrase is, but I am certainly surprised and more pained that I cannot remember just when the house, endeared to us as home, became our very own. Its possession, as I have said, had been the poetry of my mother's hard-working, loving life, and no doubt she had watched with hope and fear the maturing of each of the notes for it, with the interest they bore, until the last was paid off. In my father's buoyant expectation of the best in