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him and stimulated him to work. He began an entirely new version of
The Mysterious Stranger, of which he already had a bulky and nearly
finished manuscript, written in Vienna. He wrote several hundred
pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the
Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced
(
it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits),
he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful
idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the
previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A.
Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of
the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary,
written in '93, and originally published as a souvenir of Niagara
Falls.
*
****
To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:
DUBLIN, July 16, '05.
DEAR MR. DUNEKA,--I wrote Eve's Diary, she using Adam's Diary as her
unwitting and unconscious) text, of course, since to use any other text
(
would have been an imbecility--then I took Adam's Diary and read it.
It turned my stomach. It was not literature; yet it had been literature
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