Page:Letters of Life.djvu/382

370 To read critically, in one day, a manuscript of two hundred and sixty closely-written pages, and write a commendatory notice of it for some popular periodical.

To obtain an accomplished female teacher for the children of a member of Congress, at the far South.

A poem requested on the dog-star, Sirius.

Desired to assist a servant-man not very well able to read, in getting his Sunday-school lessons, and to "write out all the answers for him, clear through the book, to save his time."

A person feels inclined to offer a premium for some original piece of music, and would consider it "a favor if I would write six stanzas, each of eight lines, for it;" adding, that "the subject is to be Temperance," and he "does not know of any one that it possesses so much influence with as myself."

A lady, whose husband expects to be absent on a journey for a month or two, wishes I would write a poem to testify her joy at his return.

An almost illegible letter, requesting an elegy on a young man who was one of the nine children of a judge of probate, and "quite the Benjamin of the family," the member of a musical society, and who, had he lived, "would likely have been married in about one year." It is added, that his funeral was attended by a large number of people; and "if I let them have a production on his death," I am desired to dedicate and have it published for the benefit of a society whose name I cannot decipher.