probably find the most distasteful person upon earth. My case is
different. I have bad health, am often condemned to silence for
days together - was so once for six weeks, so that my voice was
awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a shadow -
have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active and
adventurous, and ran in the open air: and being a person who
prefers life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in
love, or to risk a danger, than to paint the finest picture or
write the noblest book, I begin to regard what remains to me of my
life as very shadowy. From a variety of reasons, I am ashamed to
confess I was much in this humour when your letter came. I had a
good many troubles; was regretting a high average of sins; had been
recently reminded that I had outlived some friends, and wondering
if I had not outlived some friendships; and had just, while
boasting of better health, been struck down again by my haunting
enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the
iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly
irksome. Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the
elderly this sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather
aching sense of the past and the future? Well, it was just then
that your letter and your photograph were brought to me in bed; and
there came to me at once the most agreeable sense of triumph. My
books were still young; my words had their good health and could go
about the world and make themselves welcome; and even (in a shadowy
and distant sense) make something in the nature of friends for the
sheer hulk that stays at home and bites his pen over the
manuscripts. It amused me very much to remember that I had been in
Chicago, not so many years ago, in my proper person; where I had
failed to awaken much remark, except from the ticket collector; and
to think how much more gallant and persuasive were the fellows that