Jan 31st, ‘92.

My Dear Colvin, — No letter at all from you, and this scratch from me! Here is a year that opens ill. Lloyd is off to ‘the coast’ sick — the coast means California over most of the Pacific — I have been down all month with influenza¹, and am just recovering — I am overlaid with proofs, which I am just about half fit to attend to. One of my horses died this morning, and another is now dying on the front lawn — Lloyd’s horse and Fanny’s. Such is my quarrel with destiny. But I am mending famously, come and go on the balcony, have perfectly² good nights, and though I still cough, have no oppression and no hemorrhage and no fever. So if I can find time and courage to add no more, you will know my news is not altogether of the worst; a year or two ago, and what a state I should have been in now! Your silence, I own, rather alarms me. But I tell myself you have just miscarried; had you been too ill to write, some one would have written me. Understand, I send this brief scratch not because I am unfit to write more, but because I have 58 galleys³ of the Wrecker and 102 of the Beach of Falesa to get overhauled⁴ somehow or other in time for the mail, and for three weeks I have not touched a pen with my finger.

Feb. 1st.

The second horse is still alive, but I still think dying. The first was buried this morning. My proofs are done; it was a rough two days of it, but done. Consummatum est; na uma. I believe the Wrecker ends well; if I know what a good yarn⁵ is, the last four chapters make a good yarn — but pretty horrible. The Beach of Falesa I still think well of, but it seems it’s immoral⁶ and there’s a to-do, and financially it may prove a heavy disappointment. The plaintive⁷ request sent to me, to make the young folks married properly before ‘that night,’ I refused; you will see what would be left of the yarn, had I consented. This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in it at all; but when I remember I had the Treasure of Franchard refused as unfit for a family magazine, I feel despair weigh upon my wrists.

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