“Trieste, July 12,1869.
“I am going on fairly: my malady is there, and must stay there; but I am going to tide over this time, and will not fret myself for the future.
“I’m glad you like my talk. How I’d like to read you my opening of ‘Kilgobbin.’ They like it much here, but I don’t know how much may have been said to cheer me. I’m not able to write beyond a very short time, but I must do something or my head will run clean away with me.
“My wife’s state keeps me in intense anxiety, but on the whole she is better than heretofore.
“Is there anything out worth reviewing? I’d like to have something would take me off myself for a while.
“That poor fellow Baker, who was shot, was a cousin of my wife,—a good, amiable, soft-hearted fellow, I hear, and incapable of a severe thing.”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Trieste, July 16, 1869.
“I kept over the O’Ds., at your nephew’s suggestion, till I heard from you, but am glad now to see that you have no change to advise, for I don’t think I could make them better, especially by dictation. Any value these things have is as a sort of ‘schnaps,’ and nobody likes water with his glass of curaçoa.
“The heat is so overpowering here that I can do nothing, and I am afraid, in my wife’s critical state, to leave home for the Styrian mountains, where some hospitable invitations are tempting me. From all I can learn, there is a fine field for story-writing in those unvisited lands on the Hungarian frontier, and I may one of these days perhaps be able to profit by it.