e heart before those of the head. Day
after to-morrow I go to a neighboring city to see a five-act-drama of
mine brought out, and suggest amendments in it, and would about as soon
spend a night in the Spanish Inquisition as sit there and be tortured
with all the adverse criticisms I can contrive to imagine the audience
is indulging in. But whether the play be successful or not, I hope I
shall never feel obliged to see it performed a second time. My interest
in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.

I have invented and patented a pretty good sort of scrap-book (I
think) but I have backed down from letting it be known as mine just
at present--for I can't stand being under discussion on a play and a
scrap-book at the same time!

I shall be away two days, and then return to take our tribe to New York,
where we shall remain five days buying furniture for the new house, and
then go to Hartford and settle solidly down for the winter. After all
that fallow time I ought to be able to go to work again on the book. We
shall reach Hartford about the middle of September, I judge.

We have spent the past four months up here on top of a breezy hill, six
hundred feet high, some few miles from Elmira, N. Y., and overlooking
that town; (Elmira is my wife's birthplace and that of Susie and the
new baby). This little summer house on the hill-top (named Quarry Farm
because there's a quarry on it,) belongs to my wife's sister, Mrs.
Crane.

A photographer came up the other day and wanted to make some views, and
I shall send you the result per this mail.

My study is a snug little octagonal den, with a coal-grate, 6 big
windows, one little one, and a wide doorway (the latter opening upon
the distant town.) On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my
papers down with brickbats and write in the midst of the hurricanes,
clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of. The study is nearly on
the peak of the hill; it is right in front of the little perpendicular
wall of rock left where they used to quarry stones. On the peak of the
hill is an old arbor roofed with bark and covered with the vine you call
the "American Creeper"--its green is almost bloodied with red. The
Study is 30 yards below the old arbor and 200 yards above the
dwelling-house-it is remote from all noises.....

Now isn't the whole thing pleasantly situated?

In the picture of me in the study you glimpse (through the left-hand
window) the l