write a letter.

Many a man and woman, who has written a letter and posted it, wishes
ardently that it could be recalled; and many a one who has something
disagreeable to say, and is obliged to say it in a letter because he has
promised to write, wishes that he could send the letter in blank--like
Larry O'Branigan to his wife Judy, when he was constrained to inform her
that he had been dismissed from his place, thus done into verse by the
bard of Erin:

'As it was but last week that I sent you a letter,
You'll wonder, dear Judy, what this is about,
And, troth, it's a letter myself would like better,
Could I manage to leave the contents of it out.'

Excellent, by the way, as this Hibernicism is, it is not so perfect as
the following, which it would be difficult for the most accomplished of
Paddies to surpass. A man, dying, wrote an epistle, in which, stating
that he was near death, he took an affectionate farewell of his friends.
He left the letter open on a table near him, and expired before he had
time to complete it. His attendant, just after his demise, taking up the
defunct's pen, in which the ink was scarcely yet dry, added, by way of
postcript, or rather _post-mortem-script_: 'Since writing the foregoing,
I have died.'

There is more philosophy than one would at first imagine in the apology
of him who said that his pen was so bad it could not spell correctly. To
write a letter as it should be in all respects, to be what it ought to
be, orthographically, grammatically, rhetorically right, there should be
a good pen, good paper, good ink. Many a pleasant correspondence has
been marred by want of these adjuncts; many an agreeable thought
arrested; many a composition, happily begun, hurried to an abrupt
conclusion. And how many delightful letters have been omitted or
neglected to be written by their want! We are not jesting. These
concomitants, together with nice envelopes, are as requisite to a
respectable epistle as becoming costume is to a lady. When we see a
scrawling hand on coarse paper, ill folded, worse directed, and ending,
'Yours in haste,' we think but little of the writer. Such a one may
complain of being in a hurry, but ladies and gentlemen should always
take time to do well whatsoever they do at all. No letters should be
written 'in haste' except angry ones, and the faster they are 'committed
to paper' the better. We have found it a capital plan, when in hot
wrath, to sit directly down