To our minds, no course is left you for Koto’s protection but the marriage. It seems perfectly clear to us; & considering how precarious your health is, it seems to us that further delay is not wise, for it might result in leaving the poor girl in circumstances so helpless, as well as next-to friendless, that the thing is distressing to contemplate.

All that is clear & easy to decide; but when you ask me to suggest some reading matter for you, I’ll be hanged if you don’t embarrass me. Still, I can tell you what I’ve been reading—to-wit: In English, the middle portion of the Bread-Winners; all of Clarissa Harlowe; the closing chapters of Pamela; the third volume of Saint-Simon; the fourth volume of Evelyn; the second volume of Pepys; the second volume of The Autobiography of a Whore; the third volume of Geike’s Hours with the Bible; & in German, the second volume of Schiller (the poems, I mean), the third volume of The Thirty-Years’ War; & the concluding chapters of Das Geheimniss der Alten Mamsell; in French, the tenth volume of Saint-Simon, and ◊◊ the fifth volume of Casanova. There—if none of this happy variety strikes you, you must be dam hard to please. I’m not a good person to apply to, because I seldom or never read anything that is new, & never read anything through, be it new or old.

You have observed by the papers that Charley Delmonico has escaped from his keepers & is wandering around somewhere in this bitter weather, nobody knows where. However, that is no news to you.

Aldrich has been spending a couple of days with us, & we had talks about you & Artemus & the rest of the Pfaff gang, in that old day when bohemianism sp was respectable—ah, more than respectable, heroic. B’god it was before my day—I have changed all that. Howells & I have written a play together. I wish you were here to write plays with. Why the devil did you go away out there? I’m deep in a book, now—new one—bran new subject—& am grinding it out like a steam-mill.

O come along home, you & Koto!