VIENNA, Jan. 22, '98.

DEAR HOWELLS,--Look at those ghastly figures. I used to write it
"Hartford, 1871." There was no Susy then--there is no Susy now. And
how much lies between--one long lovely stretch of scented fields, and
meadows, and shady woodlands, and suddenly Sahara! You speak of the
glorious days of that old time--and they were. It is my quarrel--that
traps like that are set. Susy and Winnie given us, in miserable sport,
and then taken away.

About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating
disaster in a book I was going to write (and will yet, when the stroke
is further away)--a man's dead daughter brought to him when he had been
through all other possible misfortunes--and I said it couldn't be done
as it ought to be done except by a man who had lived it--it must be
written with the blood out of a man's heart. I couldn't know, then, how
soon I was to be made competent. I have thought of it many a time since.
If you were here I think we could cry down each other's necks, as in
your dream. For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around, now,
with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in
eclipse.

I couldn't get along without work now. I bury myself in it up to the
ears. Long hours--8 and 9 on a stretch, sometimes. And all the days,
Sundays included. It isn't all for print, by any means, for much of it
fails to suit me; 50,000 words of it in the past year. It was because of
the deadness which invaded me when Susy died. But I have made a change
lately--into dramatic work--and I find it absorbingly entertaining. I
don't know that I can write a play that will play: but no matter, I'll
write half a dozen that won't, anyway. Dear me, I didn't know there was
such fun in it. I'll write twenty that won't play. I get into immense
spirits as soon as my day is fairly started. Of course a good deal of
this friskiness comes of my being in sight of land--on the Webster & Co.
debts, I mean. (Private.) We've lived close to the bone and saved every
cent we could, and there's no undisputed claim, now, that we can't
cash. I have marked this "private" because it is for the friends who are
attending to the matter for us in New York to reveal it when they want
to and if they want to. There are only two claims which I dispute and
which I mean to look into personally before I pay them. But they are
small. Both together they amount to only $12,500. I hope you will never