“To-day is Sunday; at least the bells have been shouting it, but ‘the Sabbath dawns no Sabbath-day for me.’ I have been reading proof and picking out manuscripts all the morning. Do you ever get desperate? I feel so now that I have got all my manuscript-household in order. They appal me by their mass. I look first at one box, and then at another, and--fill my pipe. ‘It is dreadful!’ as Clough’s heroine says in the Bothie. And 128 pages which it would take one so long to fill with his own stuff eats up that of other folks--no, I don’t mean that and would not allow such a metaphor to a contributor--is satiated so soon with that of other folks--that is, uses it up so slowly. Mille-dam! Have not two articles of ---- been on hand now for a year? He seems to spin out his brains as tenuously and uselessly as those creatures that streak the air with gossamer--no chance of catching even a stray fly of thought. Nay, his object is, I fancy, precisely what that of the aforesaid creatures may be--merely to swing himself over a gap. He is my ink--my pen-and-ink-ubus. I could scalp him the rather as he wears a wig and is deaf, and so would not be likely to hear of it. Then there is ---- who can’t express himself in less than sixteen pages on any imaginable topic. It is a terrible thing this writing for the press, by which a man’s pen learns gradually to go by itself as those Chinese servants are said to fan and sleep at the same time. ‘No, no, by heaven I am not ma-a-d!’ but I expect to be. I believe I have so far settled matters that everybody will think me a monster. But never mind, I get out of ear-shot to-morrow.” How fully and carefully he could and would write under special urgency may be seen by the long letter which he addressed to Mrs. Stowe when “The Minister’s Wooing” had been running three or four months in the _Atlantic_. The letter was published in C. E. Stowe’s life of his mother, and is quoted also in Mrs. Fields’s “Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”