I am in a state of willd enthusiasm over this July instalment of your story. It’s perfectly dazzling—it’s masterly—incomparable. Yet I heard you read it—without losing my balance. Well, the difference between your reading & your writing is—remarkable—I mean, in the effects produced & the impressions left behind. Why, the first one is to the second other as is asⒶemendation a one of Joe Twichell’s electric booming yarns repeated by a somnambulist. Goodness gracious, you read me a chapter, & it is a gentle, pearly rl dawn, with a sprinkle of faint stars in it; & by & by I strike it in print, & shout to myself, “God bless us, how has that pallid former spectacle been turned into these gorgeous sunsetⒶemendation splendors!”

Well, I don’t care how much you read your truck to me, ◊ you can’t permanently damage it for me that way. It is always perfectly fresh & dazzling when I come on it in the magazine. Of course I recognize the form of it as being familiar—but that is all. That is, I remember it as pyrotechnic figures which you set up before me, dead & cold, but ready for the match—& now I see them touched off & all ablaze with blinding fires. You can read, if you want to, but you don’t read worth a damn. I know you can read, because your readings of Cable & your repeatings of the German doctor’s remarks prove that.

That’s the best drunk scene—because the truest—that I ever read. There are touches in it which I never saw any writer take note of before. And they are set before the reader with amazing accuracy. How very drunk, & how recently drunk, & how altogether admirably drunk you must have been to enable you to contrive that masterpiece! Didn't think

Why I notice that that religious interview between Marcia & Mrs. Halleck was so deliciously humorous when you read it to me—but dear me, it’s just too lovely for anything. (Wrote Clark to collar it for the “Library.”)

Hang it, I know where the mystery is, now: When you are reading, you glide right along, & I don’t get a chance to let the things soak home; but when I catch it in the magazine, I give a page 20 or 30 minutes in w which to gently & thoroughly filter into me. YourⒶemendation humor is so very subtle, & elusive—(well, often it’s just a vanishing breath of perfume, which a body isn’t certain he smelt, till he stops & takes another smell. )—whereas you can smell other people’s all the time. And your sarcasms on women & people—dern it I always take them for compliments, on the first reading.

Evening.—Everything was going so well—so jubilantly. And now evidently Susie is stricken—& savagely—with this dire scarlet fever.