[_Saranac Lake_], _April_ 9_th_!! 1888
MY DEAR COLVIN,—I have been long without writing to you, but am not to
blame, I had some little annoyances quite for a private eye, but they ran
me so hard that I could not write without lugging them in, which (for
several reasons) I did not choose to do. Fanny is off to San Francisco,
and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner’s. Where we
shall go I know not, nor (I was going to say) care; so bald and bad is my
frame of mind. Do you know our—ahem!—fellow clubman, Colonel Majendie?
I had such an interesting letter from him. Did you see my sermon? It
has evoked the worst feeling: I fear people don’t care for the truth, or
else I don’t tell it. Suffer me to wander without purpose. I have sent
off twenty letters to-day, and begun and stuck at a twenty-first, and
taken a copy of one which was on business, and corrected several galleys
of proof, and sorted about a bushel of old letters; so if any one has a
right to be romantically stupid it is I—and I am. Really deeply stupid,
and at that stage when in old days I used to pour out words without any
meaning whatever and with my mind taking no part in the performance. I
suspect that is now the case. I am reading with extraordinary pleasure
the life of Lord Lawrence: Lloyd and I have a mutiny novel—
(_Next morning_, _after twelve other letters_)—mutiny novel on hand—a
tremendous work—so we are all at Indian books. The idea of the novel is
Lloyd’s: I call it a novel. ’Tis a tragic romance, of the most tragic
sort: I believe the end will be almost too much for human endurance—when
the hero is thrown to the ground with one of his own (Sepoy) soldier’s
knees upon his chest, and the cries begin in the Beebeeghar. O truly,
you know it is a howler! The whole last part is—well the difficulty is
that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I don’t know who is to write
it.
I still keep wonderful. I am a great performer before the Lord on the
penny whistle. Dear sir, sincerely yours,