“YOU couldn’t do it again!” I never repeat myself. It would indeed lower my “crest of haught” to find such barrenness or stinginess of entertaining powers as that shows. “Madam, there be those more gifted who make a point of repetition; it is set quite above your contempt,” will you say? Do not I know that? I can quote you the prettiest kink in rhyme “o’ that side of the question.” Listen:

And I could show you in the daintiest script where one “not all unknown to fame,” a latter-day writer of much popularity, as I have seen stated, raves and raves again over “the sweet widows.” Such things stare me in the face and might silence me, so potent is the force of example. But was ever woman made so meek and yet so set in her own way? Even your taunt does not goad me to a second letter of “the altogethery” type. I—I think indeed I only wish to show you I know the trick of that style without the help of wine or whisky. Pitiable pair, your Byron and Sheridan! Please, sir, you insist upon my style so much, you wonder more and more where I picked it up. I am urged to ask, is it all style and no sense? I am sure I told you once I picked it up where I picked up my brains. I don’t see why you do not accept that statement. You will never get nearer the truth, will you?

I re-read the passage at once, and it reads just as I wrote you—“in,” not “within.” I reckon you’ll have to come down, “Capting Scott;” not I “cushion my claws.” But a victory is twice a victory when the victor is generous. I shall not sing peans over your “altogetheriness.” “Poetical justice” is divine when it is on the right side of the river.

How you linger in the land of enchantment! Who would not under the same witchery? “The divine weather” and Hood will help us out—

It is always violent when the attack comes late in life-like whooping cough, measles, etc. But I’d by all odds rather have it then than not at all. The life that misses that delicious frenzy is a failure. Yes, I see you like the Indian summer. Just a sentence about it from your sympathetic pen, and you make picture days float before inward eyes. The languid, indolent, dreamy lapse of the autumnal sunshine; the ground beneath the walnut trees black with fallen nuts—I can hear them dropping from the branches, and the excited barking of the pretty gray squirrel; “clear, running brooks,” their babble somewhat deadened by their “freighted argosies” of dead leaves; flecks of grass here and there, green as that of early summer; misty distances, half blue, half gold; purplish shadows where the sun does not strike; flocks and herds browsing as if they too were more than half dreaming; farm-houses dotting the landscape, with their great orchards near by—oh! the heaps and heaps of “golden pippins,” “rosy-cheeked bellflowers,” “Rome beauties,” “tawny russets,” and so on; and the cider-press, with its running stream, and the big bucketfuls carried to the house; and the sheets of “piping hot” gingerbread waiting for them!

Yes, that is what you make me see. And maybe one’s sweetheart made it while he was fetching the cider! Be sure they will eat and drink together! Don’t you see their eyes foaming over with felicity? Bless me! I shouldn’t wonder if you were the very fellow. Napoleon knew all about that sort of bliss: “The happiest hours of my life were those I spent eating cherries with my little sweetheart when I was a boy.”

Shouldn’t wonder if they had a frolic shooting the seeds, should you? It used to be a farm, that place “on the Ohio side” you took in with the “Germantown view.” Perhaps that’s where you got your “Indian Summer of life” taste!

When your gaze went wandering and “lingering lovingly” in that direction, did it light on the two mounds that give their own interest to

There’s a distich of Mr. W——’s for you—I hope so. Were you alone? or accompanied by “an exuberant set,” I wonder. Surely, either way, some one must have told you of the mounds. Perhaps your “most pretentious” prattler would have told you they were antediluvian as well as anti-historic. It is plain she would have given some astonishing turn to the crank of knowledge. And had your exclamatory friend been present he might have added to the hilarity of the occasion with some such remark as—I have had so many interruptions, that flash of brilliancy has escaped me. Please put it in for me. You can do that, though you begged off on the cat. Yet you knew! You did not fool me a bit with that pretense of worrying all night. In fact, if you only remember that I am on the shady side—almost shaky—of the autumn of life, the “Indian Summer” which you enjoy, you will forbear any attempt in that direction. How gently you put it—“You’ll know about it one of these days,” just as if I didn’t already know. Some “antique gems” are afraid of their antiquity: others are worldly-wise enough to know it is that which gives them their value: while a rare few shine resplendent in that gracious acceptance of the course of nature, which takes captive “Old Father Time,” and converts the awful conqueror into the loyalest henchman. I at least feel no shame of my plus half-century of years. Though, maybe, my counter weakness is the hope of growing into one of that “rare few,” the beautiful “old ladies” I have known, and loved, and revered, and been made a little friend of when I was young! Their memory is one of my richest treasures. And now that their crown of years is hovering over my own head, may I prove worthy to wear it.

Wasn’t I right when I said, “all such gravitate to you as apples and cannon-balls to the ground?” I might have said, more simply, as “the sweet widows” gravitate to you, only I didn’t think of that in time. It was the happier “afterthought.” See how you are attracting all the most felicitous marvels of speech and gossip garnered in the memories of the experienced; now rising to the surface and exploding like bubbles in the froth of talk; now bobbing here and there like cork in the current, as light and imperishable! What store you will have for illustrations in some future “Noctes Ambrosion!” That singular death-bed speech I heard of by accident. The person was not a friend; I just knew her, though she was connected by marriage with connections of mine in the same way. It seems to me she died years ago, though I do not know. Who was “the clergyman’s” wife that told you? Why are all your friends left unnamed? Haven’t they been christened yet? It seems the strangest thing that you should have got hold of that speech! The mere fact haunts me. Was Mrs. M—— the divine musician? Front street west of Sutton runs so far—way down around the point, where you’ll lose sight of the old city, “with its dozens and dozens of agreeable people.” I can’t go prying into every house all that way to find out who she was. Please hereafter mention names.

I never read your side-splitting “French book,” “Petty Annoyances,” but I’ll get it to-day if I can. I have read some of that “bad fellow’s” books for the French some years ago. Since I have been here I have been reading Souvestre and Sainte-Beuve. I always liked the former. His was a noble soul, and I am sure he never wrote a word that he repented of on that too early death-bed. Did you ever read his “Au Coin du Feu,” a collection of stories? It shows his sweet, good, wise spirit. You must have read his “Attic Philosopher.” It had a great run, I remember—how many years ago? Sainte-Beuve I feel sure you know. I enjoy his incisiveness and his (on the whole) impartial criticisms. But I am “over head and ears” in Dutch reading: am now deep in the “Nibelungenlied.” Having seen the Nibelungenlied suite of rooms in the king’s palace, I wished to read the story in the original. I had read it in English “ever so long ago”—long enough for the mists of memory to have made a blur over some of the details. I sat up till midnight reading it—couldn’t stop, though knowing I should. It cannot need other evidence of its fascination. The frescoes at the palace no doubt added to the interest. They are hauntingly wonderful and beautiful. Even the extraordinary chanting of the story of each by the stolid guide could not spoil the impression. If ever I have a chance, I’ll favor you with a specimen of his performance. Alas! that I shall not have the cut and tinsel of his royal livery! How I wish you could see all the treasures of this “king’s palaces.” They have been gathered from a range of time reaching as far back as his ancestral line, to 1180. I doubt if any other royal line can quite equal it in many things. And the opinion is not held in the interest of my Bavarian blood either.

Now, tell me quick about “the last from B——.” Don’t keep me waiting. “Dogs and children cannot bear suspense,” and I am just like ’em. And when are you going to tell me all about the sweet detaining cause? I am a paragon of a confidante. Try me. I shan’t tell it to one, and then she can’t tell it to two. And so A. P. R. will have nothing to rue. Impromptu sparkle! Catch it and preserve it under glass.

L. G. C.

Munich, December 12, 1882.