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paying no visits, receiving none, and just lazying a heavenly life out
in their own private unpestered society, and doing their literary work,
if they have any, wholly uninterrupted. If you had hired such a boat and
sent for us we should have a couple of satisfactory books ready for
the press now with no marks of interruption, vexatious wearinesses, and
other hellishnesses visible upon them anywhere. We shall have to do this
another time. We have lost an opportunity for the present. Do you forget
that Heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these
people are all on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with
Talmage swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints
and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you
choose to make yourself an object of remark if you refrain? Then why do
you try to get to Heaven? Be warned in time.
We have all read your two opening numbers in the Century, and consider
them almost beyond praise. I hear no dissent from this verdict. I did
not know there was an untouched personage in American life, but I had
forgotten the auctioneer. You have photographed him accurately.
I have been an utterly free person for a month or two; and I do not
believe I ever so greatly appreciated and enjoyed--and realized the
absence of the chains of slavery as I do this time. Usually my first
waking thought in the morning is, "I have nothing to do to-day, I belong
to nobody, I have ceased from being a slave." Of course the highest
pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.
Therefore I labor. But I take my time about it. I work one hour or four
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