382 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



New York, November 28^ i88j. 



My dear Spencer : . . . Your communications found 

 me in a somewhat uncomfortable condition. I have long 

 anticipated tumbling downstairs and breaking my neck, 

 for only rarely can I see where the top of a staircase be- 

 gins ; so night before last I made the experiment, and fell 

 down a flight of side steps on the street. The glare of gas- 

 lights blinded me, and it was a new place and so I tumbled. 



The result was a Colles's fracture of my left wrist, the 

 same that my wife had of the right wrist a couple of years 

 ago. It was very painful for the first twenty or thirty 

 hours, but is now tolerably comfortable, and I am able to 

 get the bandaged arm in a sling. 



It will be awkward for a month or six weeks, but I ex- 

 pect no very serious inconvenience. Fortunately I am in 

 pretty good physical case, having taken considerable exer- 

 cise latterly, so that I think the reparative processes will 

 go on rapidly. 



February 26, 1884. 



So, after twenty years of battling, the sales of your 

 works are larger the last than any preceding year — a little 

 fact which I have not forgotten in dealing with the Edin- 

 burgh Review. I got a point on the old quarterly by show- 

 ing that it is too late to play over again the trick it played 

 on Thomas Young eighty years ago. 



The bones of the family continue to break. My sister's 

 carriage was upset ten days ago, breaking her left arm 

 above the elbow, and so badly spraining her shoulder that 

 she has been confined to her bed ever since. 



lishment in one or more countries, which will then serve as a melancholy 

 example for the rest of mankind, somewhat as Spain has served in the last 

 three centuries. In Cromwell's time there was more danger of the civilized 

 world succumbing to "divine right of kings" than there is now of its suc- 

 cumbing to communism ; yet the danger has been so successfully averted 

 that monarchy has ceased even to be a bugbear. 



