in the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his
Shakespearean prayer:

"To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,
Of thy success in love, and what news else
Betideth here in absence of thy friend;
And I likewise will visit thee with mine."

Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our little
village; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the real
places would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else in
the situation was really this or that. Heaven knows what gaudy
sentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travesty
had kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough.
My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story,
in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, for
that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel
either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped
myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all
very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future
sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I
went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it. My
material gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered and
threatened to perish on my hands. To crown my misery there grew up an
impatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to me
one day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say that
he did not think that story amounted to much. I did not think so either,
but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortal
effect of the stroke I do not know. Somehow I managed to bring the
wretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past. Slowly