From Ottawa he writes:  “Do not let this worry you, but kiss the children for me, and hope for the best.  I should send you some money, but there isn’t any to send, and maybe I shall only bring back myself.”  The next day he added a postscript:  “Dear Nan—­I did not send this yesterday, waiting to find the results of last night’s lecture.  It was a fair house, and this morning—­paid me $150, of which I send you the greater part.”

A few days later he wrote from Lawrence, the morning after an unexpectedly good audience:  “I made a hundred dollars by the lecture, and it is yours for yourself, Nan, to buy minxes with, if you want to.”

From Washington he writes:  “Thank you, dear Nan, for your kind, hopeful letter.  I have been very sick, very much disappointed; but I am better now and am only waiting for money to return.  Can you wonder that I have kept this from you?  You have so hard a time of it there, that I cannot bear to have you worried if there is the least hope of a change in my affairs.  God bless you and keep you and the children safe, for the sake of Frank.”

No one can read these letters without feeling that they mirror the real man, refined of feeling, kindly and humorous, but not strong of courage, oppressed by obligations, and burdened by doubts of how he was to care for those he loved.  With all his talent he could not command independence, and the lot of the man who earns less than it costs to live is hard to bear.

Harte had the faculty of making friends, even if by neglect he sometimes lost them, and they came to his rescue in this trying time.  Charles A. Dana and others secured for him an appointment by President Hayes as Commercial Agent at Crefeld, Prussia.  In June, 1878, he sailed for England, leaving his family at Sea Cliff, Long Island, little supposing that he would never see them or America again.

On the day he reached Crefeld he wrote his wife in a homesick and almost despondent strain:  “I am to all appearance utterly friendless; I have not received the first act of kindness or courtesy from anyone.  I think things must be better soon.  I shall, please God, make some good friends in good time, and will try and be patient.  But I shall not think of sending for you until I see clearly that I can stay myself.  If worst comes to worst I shall try to stand it for a year, and save enough to come home and begin anew there.  But I could not stand it to see you break your heart here through disappointment as I mayhap may do.”

Here is the artistic, impressionable temperament, easily disheartened, with little self-reliant courage or grit.  But he seems to have felt a little ashamed of his plaint, for at midnight of the same day he wrote a second letter, half apologetic and much more hopeful, just because one or two people had been a little kind and he had been taken out to a fest.