Not many weeks after the receipt of this initial article, Mr. Avery accepted an appoint ment as Minister to China. Not ambition for honors, he wrote to Muir, but the com pulsion of broken health made me risk a foreign appointment, and I especially regret that the opportunity to share in the publication of your valuable papers, and to know you most inti mately, is to be lost to me. To the deep regret of his friends, Avery died in China the follow ing year. Mr. Carmany, despairing of the Overland as a financial venture, let it come to an end in 1875, and Muir, when his current engagements were discharged, formed new literary connections.