I was busy with Mr. J. C. Freund until the day before Christmas. Then I began a Scotch story for Clarke called “The Household of McNeil,” and at the end of the year had finished nearly two chapters; I make the following entry which says all that is necessary:
December 31st, 1887. This last week has been full of work. Mary came to see me before starting for Florida, and I am very unhappy about Lilly and Captain Morgan. But I trust for the best. O God, my times are in Thy Hands, and how glad I am to leave them there! Unto Thee I look, for “Thy compassions fail not.”
The first three months of 1888 were occupied with “The Household of McNeil,” and my regular fugitive newspaper work. Alice still had her good teacher, and Lilly did not speak about her unfortunate love affair. I knew she was very unhappy, but she tried to be cheerful, and to share my pleasures and my anxieties, as she had always done; and I thought her reticence wise, though I was ready at any moment she wished to advise or to console her.
My right thumb was almost useless. I held the pencil mostly between the first and second finger, and the outside of the little finger was so sensitive, that I wrapped it in cotton wool to prevent it feeling the movement on the paper. But on my birthday, March twenty-ninth, I was finishing the fourteenth chapter of “Remember the Alamo” and enjoying the writing of the book very much indeed. Sometimes General Houston 409 seemed actually visible to me, and we had some happy hours together. General Sherman was positive that the men martyred at Goliad and San Antonio fought with the eight hundred gentlemen, who led by Houston captured the whole Spanish army, and gave the Empire State of Texas to the United States. The dead can, and do help the living, and I believe General Houston helped me to write the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth concerning that glorious episode, far too little valued and understood. If General Houston had been an Englishman, and had given the English Crown such a magnificent principality, he would have been ennobled and enriched. This great, ungrateful nation let him die wanting the comforts, yes, the necessaries of life. I have said more about this book than I intended, but I love it and “The Lion’s Whelp” better than I can express. Their characters are living people to me. I have known them, either in this life, or some other life.
This sense of companionship in many, indeed in most, of my books has made them easy and delightful to write. Sometimes it has been so vital that I have found it impossible to shut my study door. It seemed like shutting them out of my life, and I really loved these invisible, intangible friends, and often whispered their names, and bid them good night before going to sleep. To say that I shall never see them, or speak with them in another life, is an incredible thing. I expect General Sam Houston, and the great protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, to praise me, and thank me, for what I have done; and I shall not be disappointed. As far as General Houston is concerned, I have already the thanks of the son he loved so devotedly, in the following letter:
Galveston, Texas, Oct. 22, 1888.
My dear Madam:
Returning to this city a short time since, I found awaiting me your latest very interesting book, “Remember the Alamo.” Please accept my thanks, and as well, my assurances of due appreciation of the honor conferred.
The general reader I am sure cannot fail to find the style 410 in which the work is written in the highest degree entertaining. To one bound by ties of birth and blood to Texan history and traditions, it naturally possesses a peculiar interest, an interest which throughout does not flag.
Of the rather numerous productions based on the same theme, few, if any, read so much like actual history, and I think I can safely say, none show that intimate acquaintance with the peculiar social elements which composed the Texas of the days of the Republic, manifest in the valued work I now have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of.
While I have derived much pleasure from a perusal of “Remember the Alamo,” as a production of merit, I could not be insensible to the tribute paid my revered father’s memory; that the wreath is from the hand of woman lends it a grateful perfume.
I cannot but regret I am denied the honor of the personal acquaintance of one, who through her pen has made me so much her debtor for enjoyment of the most enduring kind.
I am, dear madam, with abiding sentiments of esteem,
Yours sincerely,
William R. Houston.
Often I have believed that my heroine was a real personality, that she had once lived in the very scenes I depicted. This was particularly the case with the book “Bernicia.” It is many years since I told the story of that fascinating creature, but she is as real to me today, as if she had spent the summer with me. Sometimes these phantom heroines are very masterful. In “Friend Olivia,” Anastasia made me throw away many pages, but I always discovered as the book progressed, that they did not belong to it.
Until April of this year, I was more or less troubled with Mr. Freund and the proposed play. I say “troubled” because I felt all the time that the work I had to do, was useless, that the thing someway was not right, and I know now, that neither Mr. Freund—clever actor and manager as he was—nor I, could build a play, any more than we could build a house.
On April tenth, 1888, we moved into a little cottage on Storm King Mountain, for the house we were in was sold, and the buyer wished to occupy it. I remember so well the afternoon 411 I first drove up the mountain. It was a lovely April day, Nature was making a new world, and there was no sound of hammer, or axe, or smoke of furnace. Only an inscrutable, irresistible force at work, a power so mighty, that the hard trodden sod under our feet was moved aside by a slender needle-like shaft of grass, or plant, which the faintest breeze could blow and bend. A miracle! Yes, a miracle before which science is mute. The birds were singing as if they never would grow old, and the winds streamed out of the hills as cool as living waters. The grass was climbing the mountains until it met the snow, and the mountains rose like battlements, with piny slopes furrowed by one or two steep paths.
The house I came to see was a mere cottage of five rooms, but it stood in a pleasant croft, full of fruit trees, mingled with pines and a few maples. My heart went into the place without opening gate or door, and I said to myself, “I will buy this little house, and make it a home, if God wills so; and as for it being small, there is only three of us, and we can enlarge it, if it is necessary.” The view from it was enchanting—a long stretch of the Hudson River, with mountains and valleys on every side of it. But I remembered the English dictum about buying a house, namely, “to summer and winter it first;” so I refrained the words on my lips, and instead of buying it, I offered to rent it for a year, promising to buy it then, if I still liked the place.