To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, Jan. 6, 1868.
“Your note and enclosure, though delayed by the snow in Styria, reached me all safely yesterday. Your hearty words of good cheer dallied me out of a blue-devilism that is more often my companion nowadays than some fifteen or twenty years ago.
“I am sincerely glad you liked ‘B. C.’ I sent it to you because I really thought it good—I mean, for the sort of thing it pretends to be.
“I hope you will like ‘M’Caske ‘: it may need a little retouching, but not much. I send you some O’Ds., and if I live and do well I’ll try a story for March No. I have a sort of glimmering notion of one flitting across me now.
“We are here in the midst of crêpe and black cloth, and for poor Maximilian, whose body is to arrive this week. What a blunder of our people not to send a ship to the convoy, as the French have done. We have no tact of this kind, and lose more than you would believe by the want of it.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
[Undated.]
“The Russians, people think here, will open the ball next spring by pushing the Montenegrins to a rupture with the Turks, and thus opening an opportunity for themselves to come in. Prussia is then to cross the Maine, and the rest to follow.
“Then of course the programme of those who, like myself, are ‘Know-nothings’—— But it is, at least, vraisemblable.