Cornish, September 5. We are working away on our hilltop. I have finished another Roman paper. At last J. has found a place in America where he can work. He is doing a good many landscapes. The beauty of Cornish is not believable. It is like Italy. I look out upon a scene I call the Val d’Arno, it is so like the part of the Arno one sees from above Florence. The atmosphere of work counts for something too. We don’t see people much, for they all, like ourselves, are “grind-stoning” away. All are kind as kind, however, willing and anxious to be friendly. Newport has given me such a horror of summer society—not the dear Papeterie, nor our cronies, but the big Newport—that it is stimulating to be among people of our own sort who observe as a sacred commandment the rule that nobody goes to anybody else’s house till four or five in the afternoon. Sherman Jordan, the stone mason, is a slow giant who only works when he feels like it, an enormous Hercules of a man who could fell an ox with his fist. He speaks in a high silly voice that is enough to make you scream with laughter.
“Why didn’t you come to finish laying that wall to-day?” J. asked him.
“Because I did not feel very well,” he said. Speaking of Winston Churchill, who is much in the public eye, Jordan said:
“Mr. Churchill is very tony; he has an automobile that scares the hosses to death and he drives tantrums (tandem) besides.”
I remember the early years of the new century as a time of inspiration; the spirit of hope was abroad, the whole world seemed to have received a new impulse; good resolutions blossomed into good works. Men felt their strength to be as the strength of ten, and women that the twentieth century was theirs as no other had ever been. Like everybody else, I felt the impetus and finally finished, in collaboration with my sister Florence Hall, our long-delayed book, “Dr. Howe and his Famous Pupil, Laura Bridgman.”
[To my Mother.]
January 9, 1904. Twenty-eight years ago to-day Papa died. For the first time since I began to work on the Laura Bridgman book, I can think of the day without smiting myself. Now another stunt will be to see that a statue, or some appropriate monument, is set up to his memory. I suppose one might trust his grandchildren, but I remember your old slogan:
“If you want a thing done you must do it yourself.”
I am tearing away at my Roman papers; they are acting like the devil. I may have to go to Margaret Deland to consult about them. I seemed to get a fine start; now the work grows stodgy, dull, soulless! Have had a letter from the Century, accepting my “St. John’s Eve in Rome” and offering me $100 for it. I have finished another paper for the Lippincotts; that will make five.
The Roman papers were published in book form in two volumes, “Roma Beata” and “Two in Italy.” Of the many letters received about the Laura Bridgman book, two seem best worth preserving.