we got ourselves ground up in that same mill, once, in london, and another time in paris. it is a kind of fore taste of hell. there is no way to avoid it except by the method which you have now chosen. one must live secretly and cut himself utterly off from the human race, or life in europe becomes an unbearable burden and work an impossibility. i learned something last night, and maybe it may reconcile me to go to europe again sometime. i attended one of the astonishingly popular lectures of an idiot by the name of stoddard, who exhibits interesting stereopticon pictures and then knocks the interest all out of them with his chuckleheaded comments upon them. but all the world go there to look and listen, and are apparently well satisfied. and they ought to be fully satisfied, if the lecturer would only keep still, or die in the first act. but he described how retired tradesmen and farmers in holland load a lazy scow with the family and the household effects, and then loaf along the water-ways of the low countries all the summer long, paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work, if they have any, wholly uninterrupted. if you had hired such a boat and sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. we shall have to do this another time. we have lost an opportunity for the present. do you forget that heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with talmadge swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain? then why do you try to get to heaven? be warned in time.

we have all read your two opening numbers in the century, and consider them almost beyond praise. i hear no dissent from this verdict. i did not know there was an untouched personage in american life, but i had forgotten the auctioneer. you have photographed him accurately.

i have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and i do not believe i ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed and realized the absence of the chains of slavery as i do this time. usually my first waking thought in the morning is, being read, i have nothing to do today, i belong to nobody, i have ceased from being a slave. of course the highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and the having nothing to do is labor. therefore i labor. but i take my time about it. i work one hour or four as happens to suit my mind, and quit when i please. and so these days are days of entire enjoyment. i told clark the other day to jog along comfortably and not get in a sweat. i said i believed you would not be able to enjoy editing that library over there, where you have your own legitimate work to do and be pestered to death by society besides; therefore i thought if he got it ready for you against your return, that that would be best and pleasantest.

you remember governor jewell, and the night he told about russia down in the library. he was taken down with a cold about three weeks ago, and i stepped over one evening, proposing to beguile an idle hour for him with a yarn or two, but,Ⓐemendation was received at the door with whispers, and the information that he was dying. his case had been dangerous during that day only and he died that night two hours after i left. his taking off was a prodigious surprise, and his death has been most widely and sincerely regrettedⒶemendation. wm. e. dodge, the father-in-law of one of jewell’s daughters, dropped suddenly dead the day before jewell died, but jewell died without knowing that. jewell’s widow went down to new york, to dodge’s house, the day after jewell’s funeral, and was to return here day before yesterday. and she did—in a coffin. she fell dead, of heart disease, while her trunks were being packed for her return home. florence strong, one of jewell’s daughters, who lives in detroit, started east on an urgent telegram,Ⓐemendation but missed a connection somewhere, and did not arrive here in time to see her father alive. she was his favorite child, and they had always been like lovers together. he always sent her a box of fresh flowers once a week to the day of his death; a custom which he never suspended even when he was in russia. mrs. strong had only just reached her western home again, when she was summonedⒶemendation to hartford to attend her mother’s funeral.

if you should visit paris, i want you and all the family to be sure and look up our little sculptor, karl gerhardt, who seems to be coming along admirably. if he does not kill himself with over work—which he is trying his best to do—he is bound to make a fine success in his art. his address is 11 rue boissonade.

this is a deadly winter in the region. pneumonia is slaughtering people right and left. that was jewell’s disease. the death rate of hartford for the month of january, was twenty-eight to the thousand. this is thirty or thirty-five per cent bigger than it ought to be. ninety-nine people died of pneumonia alone in new york last week.

i have had the impulse to write you several times, but was just idiot enough to forget how to get a letter to you. i shall try to remember better henceforth.

with sincerest regards to all of you,