As you describe hi me I can picture myself as I was, 22 years ago. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung & imagining he is re-modeling the world & is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense & pitiful chuckle-headedness—& an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19–20; & that is what the average Southerner is at 60 to-day. Northerners, too, of a certain grade. It is of children like this that voters are made. And such is the primalⒶemendation source of our government! A man hardly knows whether to swear or cry over it.

I think I comprehend theirⒶemendation position there—perfect freedom to vote just as you choose, provided you choose to vote as other people think—social ostracism, otherwise. The same thing exists here among the Irish. An Irish republican is a pariah among his people. Yet that race find fault with the same spirit in Know-Nothingism.2explanatory note

Fortunately a good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely. I live in the freest corner of the country. There are no social disabilities between me & my democratic personal friends. We break the bread & eat the salt of hospitality freely together & never dream of such a thing of as offering impertinent interference in each other’s political opinions.

Don’t you ever come to New York again & not run up here to see me. I suppose we were away for the summer when you were east; but no matter, you could have telegraphed & found out. We were at Elmira, N. Y., right on your road, & could have given you a good time if you had allowed us the chance.

Yes, Will Bowen & I have exchanged letters now & then for several years, but I suspecte that I made him mad with my last—shortly after you saw him in St Louis, I judge.3explanatory note There is one thing which I can’t stand, & won’t stand, from many people. That is, sham sentimentality—the kind a school-girl puts into her graduating composition; the sort that makes up the Original Poetry column of a country newspaper; the rot that deals in “the happy days of yore,” “the sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” & its “vanished dreams”——& all that sort of drivel. Will’s were always of this stamp. I stood it years. When I get a letter like that from a grown man & he a widower with a family, it gives me the bowel complaint. And I just told Will Bowen so, last summer. I told him to stop being 16 at 40; told him to stop drooling about the sweet yet melancholy past, & take a pill. I said there was not but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, & rejoice & that was the fact that it is the past—can’t be restored. Well, I exaggerated some of these truths a little—but only a little—but my idea was to kill his nasty sham sentimentality once & forever, & so make a good fellow of him again. I went to the unheard-of trouble of re-writing the letter & saying the same harsh things softly, so as to sweet sugar-coat the anguish & make it a little more endurable; & I asked him to write & tel thank me honestly for doing him the best & kindliest favor thanⒶemendation any friend ever had done him—but he hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he will, sometime. I am grateful to God that I got that letter off before he was married (I get that news from you,) else he would just have slobbered all over me & drowned me when that event happened.

I enclose photograph for the young ladies. I will remark that I do not wear seal-skin for grandeur, but because I found, when I used to lecture in the winter, that nothing else was able to keep a man warm sometimes, in these high latitudes.4explanatory note I wish you had sent pictures of yourself & family 5explanatory note—I’ll trade picture for picture with you, straight through, if you are commercially inclined.