I can risk waiting. That old fellow may be going to use the material at once. I believe I shall try making a poem of it, and if I hit it off, I will send you a copy to let you see what I have done with it. If I could only get that thing out as it is in my mind! I think I will imagine some old fellow, seeing in that pair of lovers the phantom of his own love, dead forty years. That would allow me to put in some Thackeray touches, (that elderly unknown was quite a Thackeray type,) and I could use my own experience with a Certain Person. Line, that girl looked just like a Certain Person: I mean her figure, so slight and light and electrical" and the way she glanced defiantly back at us over her shoulder, when she put her arm round him again!
III.
From Abner J. Baysley to Rev. William Baysley, Timber Creek, Iowa.
New York, December 19, 1901.
Dear Brother:
Yours of the 15th received, and contents noted. Would say that we are all usually well, and getting used to our life here as well as we can. It is worse for wife and I than it is for the girls, but I guess they are a little homesick, too. Am not sure but what it is worse for them, because the girls have not much to do, and mother and me are pretty well taken up, her with her housekeeping, and me getting settled in the business here, and feeling anxious whether I can make it go or not. When the company offered me the place here, at $2,600, I thought it was a fortune, but money does not go quite so far in New York as what it would in Timber Creek; I have to pay forty dollars a month for rent alone, and we live in a six-room flat, with two of the rooms so dark that we have to bum gas in them by day, and gas costs. But the kitchen is sunny, and Ma likes that. We set there of an evening when the girls are carrying on in the parlor, with their music, and try to make ourselves believe that we are in the old home-kitchen at Timber Creek; but with a gas range it is difficult. Was you really thinking of renting the old place? Would let you have it on easy terms. I can't bear to think of it standing empty the whole winter long. Would say, go into it, William, and welcome, for anything you are a mind to pay. If you didn't mean that, all right; Ma thought maybe you did. I know your wife would use it well. Would say, you can have the horse over the winter for his keep, and if you can sell him for anything in the spring, will allow you a fair percentage. I know you will do the best you can for me. Perhaps Watson will take him off your hands; he wanted a horse.
My, but it brings the old place up to talk about these things! But a man can't afford to indulge in much sentiment if he expects to get along in New York. He has got to be business from the word go. I try to push things all I can, but sometimes, William, I am most afraid I am getting too old for it, and if the company finds that out it will be all day with me. A trust has no bowels, but I don't blame them, I suppose I should be just so myself. William do you ever think people live too long? There, you will say, he is flying in the face of providence, and the Lord knows I don't mean to, but am thankful for all my blessings. I don't know how ma and the girls could get along without me, old as I am, in this awful city, or me without them for that matter. The girls have not got acquainted much, if any, yet. It is not very sociable here. We have been in this house nearly two weeks, and although as much as twenty families live above and below us, in the six stories, nobody has called. Well its like this, its more like living in the same street than what it is in the same house, but in Timber Creek we wouldn't have been in the same street or hardly in the same town without pretty much everybody calling inside of two weeks. But the girls say they like it, and that it gives them more of a chance to choose their own acquaintance. Speaking of acquaintance, they say that New-Yorkers never meet each other on the street, but if two country fellows happen to be in New York at the same time they are sure to bump against each other before the day's out. And that is just exactly what happened to me this morning in Broadway. You remember the Widow Ardith's boy that went onto the paper in Wottoma? Well, who should I run right into but him day before yesterday, just off the train with his grip in his hand. I told him to come round, and he said he would, the first chance he got, and its fired the girls all up, the idea of a gentleman caller. He always did dress pretty well when he come home from Wottoma on a visit, and he was looking just out of a bandbox, though he never was anyways stuck up. If we could get him for a boarder or to take one of the rooms it would help out considerable, but the girls said they would have my scalp if I dared to hint at such a thing to him, so I am going to lay low. Would say, take the old place William, and if you cannot afford to pay any rent till you have disposed of your house, all right; you can have it for nothing till then. I know you must be uncomfortable where you are, so far from your church, especially evening meetings. You could send us some of the apples. One of them old Bambos or Sheeps Noses would taste good. Ma and the girls joins me in love to you and Emmeline. When you write give our love to the rest of your family. I hope Sally is getting along all right.
To think of you being a grandfather before me when so much younger, but so it goes.
Your affectionate brother,
Ab.
IV.
From Miss America Ralson to Miss Caroline
Descheites, Wottoma.
My Dearest Caro:
I owe you a great many apologies for not writing before this, but if you only knew all I have been through you would not ask for a single one. I thought it was bad enough when we got here late in the spring after everybody one knows had gone out of town, but since the season began this fall it has been simply a whirl. It began with the Horse Show, of course, and now we are in the midst of the Dog Show which opened to-day with twelve hundred dogs; and I thought I should go insane with their barking all at once, and when I got mother home, I was afraid she was going to be down ill. But in New York you have got to get used to things, and that is what I keep telling mother, or else go back to Wottoma, where she never put her nose out of the house once in a month, and went to bed every night at nine. After the Dog Show there will not be much of anything till the opera begins. Father has taken a box for the nights when the owner does not go, and it is going to cost him a thousand dollars for the time he has it.
We have had a great many cards already, and invitations to Teas and At Homes; they seem to be the great thing in New York, and I think it is just as well to begin that way till we know the ropes a little better. You may be in society all your life in Wottoma, and yet you have got to go slow in New York. We have been to one dinner at a gentleman's that father was thrown with in business, but they seemed to think we did not want to meet anybody but Western people; and there was nothing about it in the society column. Father had a good time, for he always takes his good time with him, and the lady and her daughter were as pleasant to me as could be; mother could not be got to go; but I did not come to New York to meet Western people, and I shall think over the next invitation we get from that house. They are in the Social Register, and so I suppose they are all right themselves, but if it had not been for a crowd of people that came in after dinner, I should not have thought they knew anybody but strangers. I should say nearly all of these after-dinner people were New-Yorkers; there is something about the New York way of dressing and talking that makes you know them at once as far as you can see them. I had some introductions, but I did not catch the names any of the time, and I could not ask for them the way father does, so I did not know who I was talking with.
They all seemed to talk about the theatre, and that was lucky for me, because you know I am so fond of it, and I have been to nearly everything since the season began: Irving, of course, and Maude Adams, and John Drew, and " Colorado, " and " Way Down East, " and " Eben Holden, " and I don't know what all. Father likes one thing and I like another, and so we get in pretty much all the shows. We always take a box, and that gives father practice in wearing his dress suit every night for dinner; I could hardly get him to at first; and he kept wearing his
