To Dr. John Brown, in Edinburgh:
Quarryfarm, near Elmira, N. Y.
Sept. 4, 1874.
Dear friend,—I have been writing
fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for
sometime now, on a book (a story) and consequently
have been so wrapped up in it and so dead to anything
else, that I have fallen mighty short in letter-writing.
But night before last I discovered that that day’s
chapter was a failure, in conception, moral truth to
nature, and execution—enough blemish to
impair the excellence of almost any chapter—and
so I must burn up the day’s work and do it all
over again. It was plain that I had worked myself
out, pumped myself dry. So I knocked off, and
went to playing billiards for a change. I haven’t
had an idea or a fancy for two days, now—an
excellent time to write to friends who have plenty
of ideas and fancies of their own, and so will prefer
the offerings of the heart before those of the head.
Day after to-morrow I go to a neighboring city to
see a five-act-drama of mine brought out, and suggest
amendments in it, and would about as soon spend a
night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there and be
tortured with all the adverse criticisms I can contrive
to imagine the audience is indulging in. But
whether the play be successful or not, I hope I shall
never feel obliged to see it performed a second time.
My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent
death when the work is done.
I have invented and patented a pretty good sort of scrap-book (I think) but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just at present —for I can’t stand being under discussion on a play and a scrap-book at the same time!
I shall be away two days, and then return to take our tribe to New York, where we shall remain five days buying furniture for the new house, and then go to Hartford and settle solidly down for the winter. After all that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book. We shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge.
We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill, six hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N. Y., and overlooking that town; (Elmira is my wife’s birthplace and that of Susie and the new baby). This little summer house on the hill-top (named Quarry Farm because there’s a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife’s sister, Mrs. Crane.