over the March notices, I wish you would send me the best one and the worst one. It was a poem not calculated to please rustic critics like "It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad morals." My friend, you are shirking. I find but one pencil mark of yours on my proof. Someone in red has annotated me. Several of his suggestions are excellent, the others would ruin me if I followed them. I like your marginal notes even when I disagree with them, which is not often. When I get the article straightened out I'll come to Cambridge and run over it with you if you are very much engaged. I hope your little ones got well the same day you mailed me the postal card. My boys are having fine times coasting and building snow-forts. To the Same MY DEAR HOWELLS, PONKAPOG, MASS., March 20, 1876. folks let me have another glance at the "Old Gentleman" before they stretch him on the rack? I don't know that it is important, but I am anxious not to have any particularly weak spots in that article. . . . If you'll come out I'll read you or not read you, just as you please—the first two chapters of "The Queen of Sheba," which promises not to be too stupid. I got the "Atlantic" last night and read it at once like a rustic subscriber. I don't see what you are going to do with Mrs. Farwell. I would n't have her on my hands for a fortune. Lathrop's paper is exceedingly good, and Scudder's could n't be better, in its way. But as I'm not paid for this sort of thing, I'll stop. I cannot at this moment put my finger on the line which connects the publishers in America with the falling of my chimneys in Charles Street, but I feel very keenly that somebody in the trade has got to suffer presently, and will not regard the thing as a joke. The sight of a brick lying in the road turns my stomach. P. S. I've just written the jolliest little tearful ballad you ever saw. To Bayard Taylor PONKAPOG, MASS., April 16, 1876. MY DEAR BAYARD, .. You ask me why I bury myself in these wilds. I never was so comfortable. I've an old farmhouse with five rooms on a floor: I have garnished it with all my city furniture, pictures, books, draperies, etc. I've one hundred and twenty-five chickens! I have butter that would cost you a dollar per pound in New York, and milk that you cannot get at any price. . . . I am twelve miles from my lemon- the "Atlantic Monthly." With the rent of the house in Charles Street, and the dollars which literature brings me, I am more independent than the late A. T. Stewart ever was. When I feel like it, I write; I've a lot of things in MS. When I don't care to work, I read, and study Italian. The German language is a foe whom I intend to lay out next summer. I should deserve to be put into a lunatic asylum if I were to give up this life for the sake of going to New York to live in a flat, the rent of which would take half my income. We have had a charming winter here; in summer the place is delightful. I do not know a locality, except Portsmouth, that has so many lovely roads winding about it. Altogether, I don't ask anything better for the next two or three years I have a lease for five. When my boys are older I mean to go abroad and remain long enough for them to learn to speak French and German. All this, God willing. I had an odd mail the other day, bringing me letters from Yeddo, London, Florence, Leipzig, Paris, and Rome! The postmaster here regards me as a suspicious character. But don't you. Ever yours, T. B. A. The New York "Tribune," in referring to the fact that Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich is to publish next month a volume of the best of his uncollected poems under the dainty title of "Flower and Thorn," says that the poet dwells "in a village about twenty miles from Boston, possessing the most musical and most melancholy name of Ponkafrog, and surrounded by much good fishing." The "Tribune" has made the name of the village more melancholy, if not more musical, than it really is - Ponka |