Will you send a bound & an unbound copy of the Prince to Harris right away?

Last summer I suggested to him that you would be the right man to publish his books. You see per enclosed, that he is going to write a story. If you would like to have it for yourself & Chatto, drop him a line.

enclosure:

the constitution, atlanta, ga. editorial rooms.

I ought to have thanked you long ago for your kindness in sending me the legend of the Golden Arm, and for your generous refusal to regard Uncle Remus from the standpoint of a critic. I have been endeavoring to verify the legend, however, and with that end in view I sent it down into Putnam county. It comes back a little changed. The golden arm has disappeared, and “a silver sev’mpunce wat de folk’s done gone en put on de ’oman eyeled fer ter keep um shot” has taken its place. The “sev’mpunce” (or sevenpenceⒶemendation) is stolen and put in a box, where it jumps up and rattles when the woman’s ghost comes, and there are various other complications of a ghastly sort with which I will not worry you. The two stories may be entirely different, but since beginning the work of collecting the animal myths I have fallen a victim to the comparative method, and it is sometimes embarrassing.

I see the critics of the New York Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly are surprised at your new book and also pleased with it, but I don’t understand how it can be in the nature of a revelation to those who have read between the lines of some of your sketches and after-dinner speeches. Speaking of the Atlantic, I have often pictured to myself the astonishment which of the Boston maidens when they turned from one of Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s essays on “The Comity of Sensibility,” or “Color as a Transgression” to the deep-toned hilarity of one of your sketches. Was it on this account that Mr. Howells retired to amuse himself with overwork? I remember laughing myself sore over your report of the troubles of the family which mistook the firing of a cannon for a thunderstorm—and I laughed the more when I thought of the attitude of Boston.

I haven’t ventured to write to Mr. Osgood, but I have in mind a story of slave-life in the south which I would be glad to have him publish—provided it passes muster with The Century people.

I trust your lumbago difficulty has passed away; but I am curious to know this: if with the lumbago, you can be good, and kind, and gentle to an unknown fellowⒶemendation in a far country (as you have been to me) what would you have been if you had never known lumbago?