THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH TO E.S.  MORSE

    DEAR MR. MORSE: 

It was very pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day.  Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it.  I don’t think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (at which I guessed).

There’s a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours—­it never grows old; it never loses its novelty.  One can say to one’s self every morning:  “There’s that letter of Morse’s.  I haven’t read it yet.  I think I’ll take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few days to make out what he means by those t’s that look like w’s, and those i’s that haven’t any eyebrows.”

Other letters are read, and thrown away, and forgotten; but yours are kept forever—­unread.  One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

    Admiringly yours,
    T.B.  ALDRICH.

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY TO JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY

    THE QUADRANGLE CLUB,
    CHICAGO, September 30, ’99.

Your generous praise makes me rather shamefaced:  you ought to keep it for something that counts.  At least other people ought:  you would find a bright ringing word, and the proportion of things would be kept.  As for me, I am doing my best to keep the proportion of things, in the midst of no-standards and a dreary dingy fog-expanse of darkened counsel.  Bah! here I am whining in my third sentence, and the purpose of this note was not to whine, but to thank you for heart new-taken.  I take the friendly words (for I need them cruelly) and forget the inadequate occasion of them.  I am looking forward with almost feverish pleasure to the new year, when I shall be among friendships which time and absence and half-estrangements have only made to shine with a more inward light; and when, so accompanied, I can make shift to think and live a little.  Do not wait till then to say Welcome.

    W.V.M.

BRET HARTE TO HIS WIFE

    LAWRENCE, KANSAS,
    October 24, 1873.

    MY DEAR ANNA,—­

I left Topeka—­which sounds like a name Franky might have invented—­early yesterday morning, but did not reach Atchison, only sixty miles distant, until seven o’clock at night—­an hour before the lecture.  The engine as usual had broken down, and left me at four o’clock fifteen miles from Atchison, on the edge of a bleak prairie with only one house in sight.  But I got a saddle-horse—­there was no vehicle to be had—­and strapping my lecture and blanket to my back I gave my valise to a little yellow boy—­who looked like a dirty terra-cotta figure—­with orders to follow me on another horse, and so tore off towards Atchison.  I got there in time; the boy reached there two hours after.