I find that the damned fire was in me and ought to have been quenched with a dash of cold sense. I'm having my canoe decked and yawl-rigged for deep water and live in the hope of being drowned according to the dictates of my conscience.
By way of proving my power of self-restraint I'm going to stop this screed with a whole page unused.
Sincerely yours, as ever, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C.,
February 3,
1906.
Dear George,
I don't know why I've not written to you—that is, I don't know why God made me what I have the misfortune to be: a sufferer from procrastination.
* * *
I have read Mary Austin's book with unexpected interest. It is pleasing exceedingly. You may not know that I'm familiar with the kind of country she writes of, and reading the book was like traversing it again. But the best of her is her style. That is delicious. It has a slight "tang" of archaism—just enough to suggest "lucent sirups tinct with cinnamon," or the "spice and balm" of Miller's sea-winds. And what a knack at observation she has! Nothing escapes her eye. Tell me about her. What else has she written? What is she going to write? If she is still young she will do great work; if not—well, she has done it in that book. But she'll have to hammer and hammer again and again before the world will hear and heed.
As to me I'm pot-boiling. My stuff in the N. Y. American (I presume that the part of it that you see is in the Examiner) is mere piffle, written without effort, purpose or care. My department in the Cosmopolitan is a failure, as I told Millard it would be. It is impossible to write topical stuff for a magazine. How can one discuss with heart or inspiration a thing that happens two months or so before one's comments on it will be read? The venture and the title were Hearst's notion, but the title so handicaps me that I can do nothing right. I shall drop it.