play upon
it with his master touch, but the dreary intermissions of travel and
broken sleep were too heavy a price to pay.

*****

To Mrs. Jane Clemens and family, in St. Louis

ELMIRA, June 4. (1868)

DEAR FOLKS,--Livy sends you her love and loving good wishes, and I send
you mine. The last 3 chapters of the book came tonight--we shall read it
in the morning and then thank goodness, we are done.

In twelve months (or rather I believe it is fourteen,) I have earned
just eighty dollars by my pen--two little magazine squibs and one
newspaper letter--altogether the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent
in my life. And in that time my absolute and necessary expenses have
been scorchingly heavy--for I have now less than three thousand six
hundred dollars in bank out of the eight or nine thousand I have made
during those months, lecturing. My expenses were something frightful
during the winter. I feel ashamed of my idleness, and yet I have had
really no inclination to do anything but court Livy. I haven't any other
inclination yet. I have determined not to work as hard traveling,
any more, as I did last winter, and so I have resolved not to lecture
outside of the 6 New England States next winter. My Western course would
easily amount to $10,000, but I would rather make 2 or 3 thousand in New
England than submit again to so much wearing travel. (I have promised
to talk ten nights for a thousand dollars in the State of New York,
provided the places are close together.) But after all if I get located
in a newspaper in a way to suit me, in the meantime, I don't want to
lecture at all next winter, and probably shan't. I most cordially hate
the lecture field. And after all, I shudder to think that I may never
get out of it.

In all conversations with Gough, and Anna Dickinson, Nasby, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips and the other old stagers, I could not
observe that they ever expected or hoped to get out of the business. I
don't want to get wedded to it as they are. Livy thinks we can live on
a very moderate sum and that we'll not need to lecture. I know very
well that she can live on a small allowance, but I am not so sure about
myself. I can't scare her by reminding her that her father's family
expenses are forty thousand dollars a year, because she produces the
documents at once to show that precious little of this outlay is on her
account. But I must not