I wish you or Mrs. Fields would suggest one.  Perhaps you may snatch a title out of the infinite void that will miraculously suit the book, and give me a needful impetus to write it.

“I want a great deal of money.....  I wonder how people manage to
live economically.  I seem to spend little or nothing, and yet it
will get very far beyond the second thousand, for the present
year....  If it were not for these troublesome necessities, I doubt
whether you would ever see so much as the first chapter of the new
Romance.

    “Those verses entitled ‘Weariness,’ in the last magazine, seem to me
    profoundly touching.  I too am weary, and begin to look ahead for the
    Wayside Inn.”

I had frequent accounts of his ill health and changed appearance, but I supposed he would rally again soon, and become hale and strong before the winter fairly set in.  But the shadows even then were about his pathway, and Allan Cunningham’s lines, which he once quoted to me, must often have occurred to him,—­

    “Cauld’s the snaw at my head,
    And cauld at my feet,
    And the finger o’ death’s at my een,
    Closing them to sleep.”

We had arranged together that the “Dolliver Romance” should be first published in the magazine, in monthly instalments, and we decided to begin in the January number of 1864.  On the 8th of November came a long letter from him:—­

“I foresee that there is little probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month.  It will be in time for the February number, if it turns out fit for publication at all.  As to the title, we must defer settling that till the book is fully written, and meanwhile I see nothing better than to call the series of articles ‘Fragments of a Romance.’  This will leave me to exercise greater freedom as to the mechanism of the story than I otherwise can, and without which I shall probably get entangled in my own plot.  When the work is completed in the magazine, I can fill up the gaps and make straight the crookednesses, and christen it with a fresh title.  In this untried experiment of a serial work I desire not to pledge myself, or promise the public more than I may confidently expect to achieve.  As regards the sketch of Thoreau, I am not ready to write it yet, but will mix him up with the life of The Wayside, and produce an autobiographical preface for the finished Romance.  If the public like that sort of stuff, I too find it pleasant and easy writing, and can supply a new chapter of it for every new volume, and that, moreover, without infringing upon my proper privacy.  An old Quaker wrote me, the other day, that he had been reading my Introduction to the ‘Mosses’ and the ’Scarlet Letter,’ and felt as if he knew me better than his best friend; but I think he considerably overestimates the extent of his intimacy with me.