Like enough, you are having too good a time. Well, then, I will interfere. I have got to lose my day’s work, on account of good old Frank Soulés letter, because it has taken me clear away from my book; but I mean to get even by taking the tuck out of one of your junketing days—that is to s—I am going to shove this matter over onto you.

NowⒶemendation, t This looks highhanded, but there are fair & honorable reasons for it. Frank Soulé was one of the sweetest and whitest & loveliest spirits that ever wandered into this world by mistake; I seem somehow to have got the impression that he has of late years become sour & querulous; cannot tell—it has been 13 years since I worked at his side in the Morning Call office, in San Francisco; but no matter, he has believed for 36 years, that he would next year, & then next year, & still next year, be recognized as a poet—& all these slow years have come & gone, & each in tu its turn has lied to him. Soured?—why anybody would be, that had been served so. Therefore, don’t you mind whether he is sour or sweet; you just go to the Alta office & call on him—it is the right courtesy from a young successful man to an old unsuccessful one—an old unsuccessful one who has seen the day when a young fellow right up stairs over his head (Harte), & another one at his elbow (me), looked upon a compliment from Frank Soulé as praise from Sir Hubert. And he was not stingy of his applause; whoever earned it, got it. Frank Soulé had that sort of a face which is so rare—I mean a face that is always welcome, that makes you happy all through, just to see it. And Lordy, to think that this fine & sensitive & beautiful & proud spirit had to grind, & grind, like a pitiful slave, on that degraded “Morning Call,” whose mission from hell & politics was to lick the boots of the Irish & throw bold brave mud at the Chinamen. And he is a slave yet!

Now I am not done yet. You see he asks very little: only that his book shall be published, that is all; royalties & copyrights are not in the question. You ask him to put a selection of his poems into your hands, to be read at your hotel or on the road; & tell him you will tell Osgood or some publisher just what you think of them, leaving the publisher to decide whether to take the book or decline it. O, dear, it was always a painful thing to me to see the Emperor (Norton I., of San Francisco) begging; for although nobody else believed he was an Emperor, he believed it. And Frank Soulé believes himself a poet (& so many others believe it, too) & it is sad enough to see him on the street begging for the charity of mere notice.

What an odd thing it is, that neither Frank Soulé, nor Charley Warren Stoddard, nor I, nor Bret Harte the Immortal Bilk, nor any other professionally literary person of S. F., has ever “written up” the Emperor Norton. Nobody has ever written him up who was able to see any but his ludicrous or his grotesque side; but I think that with all his dirt & unsavoriness there was a pathetic side to him. Anybody who said so in print would be laughed at in S. F., doubtless, but no matter, I have seen the Emperor when his dignity was wounded; and when he was both hurt & indignant at the dishonoring of an imperial draft; & when he was full of trouble & bodings on account of the presence of the Russian fleet, he connecting it with his refusal to ally himself with the Romanoffs by marriage, & believing these ships were come to take advantage of his entanglements with Peru & Bolivia; I have seen him in all his various moods & tenses, & there was always more room for pity than laughter. He believed he was a natural son of one of the English Georges—but I wander from my subject.

I shall write Soulé that I am not a judge of poetry, but that if you find merit in his book I shall then know it is meretricious meritorious, & will cheerfully hunt down a publisher for him, if it be possible, either in conjunction with you or alone. As for the correspondence, I am up a stump, there—I don’t seem to know any editors at all, personally, except one or two upon whose lives I have designs. Besides, I never have heard of a newspaper that wanted a San Francisco correspondence; bless us, it wouldn’t have the least interest for anybody. Well, I’ll tell him that.

And I shall tell him that if circumstances pe give you a chance, you will look in on him. , & if

There’s some more things to go in this letter—I’ll add them in a P.S. this evening.