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  Jewett Letters - Contents

SARAH ORNE JEWETT
LETTERS

ENLARGED AND REVISED EDITION

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
RICHARD CARY

WATERVILLE ~ MAINE

Copyright by COLBY COLLEGE PRESS ~ 1967

LETTER TEXTS



1 HORACE E. SCUDDER
     Horace Elisha Scudder (1838-1902), biographer of James Russell Lowell and Bayard Taylor, started as manuscript reader in 1866 and remained to the end of his life in supervisory editorial positions with the publishing firms which eventually developed into Houghton Mifflin Company. Editor of the Riverside Magazine for Young People from 1867 to 1870, and of the Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1898, he displayed critical acumen and unfailing kindness in his dealings with fledgling authors. Of Miss Jewett's numerous relationships with editors, this was the longest and most fruitful.

     November 15, 1869

    Dear Sir:
     I beg your pardon for troubling you again but this is quite important to me. Is it too late to change the signature to my story "The Shipwrecked Buttons?"1 For that is signed 'S. Jewett,' and I thought a while ago that I would adopt that instead of the one I have used hitherto -- 'Alice Eliot.' I see that a story of mine in the December Atlantic2 is credited to the latter (Alice Eliot),3 and it would be a very great satisfaction to me if the story you have, could be the same. I hope it's not too late, and if you can have it changed I shall be more obliged than ever to you.
     Thank you for your note which I received last week.
     Most respectfully,
     'Alice Eliot'

     NOTES:
     1 By Alice Eliot, Riverside Magazine for Young People, IV (January 1870), 30-35; collected in Play Days.
     2"Mr. Bruce," by A. C. Eliot, Atlantic Monthly, XXIV (December 1869), 701-710; collected in Old Friends and New.
     3The origin of Miss Jewett's nom de plume Alice Eliot and its variant A. C. Eliot is a matter of speculation. It may have derived from the nearby town of Eliot, Maine, which she visited often as a child, or from George Eliot, whose life and works she spoke and wrote about.  The motive for her vacillation between pen names and real name is also vague.  Between January 1868 and May 1871 she signed her first eight publications respectively A. C. Eliot, Alice Eliot, A. C. Eliot, Alice eliot, Alice Eliot, Sarah Jewett, Sarah O. Sweet, and S. O. J.  (See Clara Carter Weber & Carl J. Weber,  A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett [Waterville, Maine,1949], 29-30.) Miss Jewett's own explanation for these mutations is to be found in "Looking Back on Girlhood," Youth's Companion, LXV (January 7, 1892), 6: "I was very shy about speaking of my work at home, and even sent it to the magazine under an assumed name." Scudder could see no wisdom in this nimble name-changing and in a letter dated May 21, 1870, advised her to "drop all use of . . . pseudonym." (Houghton Library, Harvard.)


2 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     November 30, 1869

     Dear Sir:

     Thank you for your kind note and especially for your criticisms on my two stories.1 They will help me, I know. You were right about "Mr. Bruce" and if I were talking instead of writing I would tell you of ever so many things that might have been very different. I couldn't expect it to be perfect. In the first place I couldn't write a perfect story, and, secondly, I didn't try very hard on that. I wrote it in two evenings after ten, when I was supposed to be in bed and sound asleep, and I copied it in part of another day. That's all the work I 'laid out' on it. It was last August and I was nineteen then, but now I'm twenty. So you see you are 'an old hand' and I 'a novice' after all. Do you remember in "Mr. Bruce" I made Elly say that, like Miss Alcott's Jo,2 she had the habit of 'falling into a vortex?' That's myself, but I mean to be more sensible. I mean to write this winter and I think you will know of it.
     I like the Riverside M[agazine] so much, and what you have written, and you are delightful to have dear old Hans Andersen. I don't see the Riverside regularly though. I'm not a bit grown up if I am twenty and I like my children's books just as well as ever I did, and I read them just the same. I'd like to see the "Buttons" in print; you said the 18th, I think. It's a dreadful thing to have been born very lazy, isn't it, Mr. Scudder? For I might write ever so much; it's very easy for me, and when I have been so successful in what I have written. I ought to study -- which I never did in my life hardly, except reading, and I ought to try harder and perhaps by and by I shall know something I can write really well.3
     There was no need for me to write this note and I'm a silly girl. I know it. But your letter was very nice and you are kind to be interested in my stories. So I beg your pardon and will never do so any more.
     You said you had seen my name before. It was some verses -- "The Old Doll"4 -- two or three years ago, I think. I must hunt them up. I believe they were very silly.
     Yours very respectfully and gratefully,
     'Alice Eliot'

     NOTES:
     1 "Mr. Bruce" and "The Shipwrecked Buttons."
     2 Jo March, the unconventional heroine of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868).
     3 Miss Jewett's schooling consisted of sporadic attendance for several years at Miss Olive Raynes's school in South Berwick and four years at Berwick Academy, from which she was graduated in 1865. Her real education came through association with her father, Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett (see Genealogical Chart and Letter 4, note 7). In her early teens Miss Jewett began to suffer from acute attacks of rheumatism. Believing that her health would improve out-of-doors, Dr. Jewett took her with him on his professional rounds. ("I used to follow him about silently, like an undemanding little dog.") At each backland farm and coastline fishing shack she absorbed invaluable impressions of people and households; between stops she observed the particularities of nature; and as they rode along he transmitted to her an abiding knowledge and love of good books. Miss Jewett dedicated Country By-Ways "To T. H. J., my dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew; who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the Country By-Ways." A man of simple tastes who "was impatient only with affectation and insincerity," he recognized long before she did the direction her life was taking, and advised her, "Don't try to write about people and things, tell them just as they are!" (See Letters 25 note 2; 68, note 2; 99.) The first two poems in Verses are poignant memorials "To My Father," and in 1901 Miss Jewett presented a stained-glass window in his memory to Bowdoin College, of which he was an alumnus and former faculty member.
     4 Miss Jewett had evidently submitted this poem to Riverside Magazine and had received a rejection. "The Old Doll" subsequently appeared in the Independent, XXV (July 24, 1873), 933.



3 LUCRETIA FISK PERRY
     Lucretia Morse Fisk Perry of Exeter, New Hampshire, was the wife of Dr. William Gilman Perry, Miss Jewett's maternal uncle (see Genealogical Chart). A chronic victim of asthma, which restricted her traveling and visiting, she compensated by writing lively, descriptive letters, and entertaining a steady stream of friends who sometimes called for the day and stayed for a week. "A wise and constant lover of good books," she conveyed her approval of Dickens, Browning, and a score of others to her eager young niece. Miss Jewett attributed much of her desire to improve intellectually to this aunt.

     Sunday evening
     January 28, 1872

    Dear Aunty:

     Thank you for your letter which came in good time, for we were all depending upon hearing from you. I was glad to find out about the essay. You will be surprised to hear that Father1 is going to New York tomorrow, that is, if his cold is well enough. He has been quite ill all the week and I knew from former experiences that he would not refuse going to see people now he is better -- and so he would be tired out and miserable for weeks to come. Anything is better for him than being here -- and Mother2 and I have given him no peace and silenced every argument -- and Mary3 has written appealingly and he has consented to go, and now quite enjoys the idea. I know it will do him good. It will if he is at all like me, for when I last went to Boston I was scarcely able to sit up the day before and had not been 'outside the door' for a week with a bad cold 'on my lungs' and that same afternoon was out shopping minus any extra wrappings and stayed out until dark in the midst of a December drizzle and half snowstorm and have continued in good health to the present time!
     I can scarcely wait until Saturday to see Mary, though I gave up missing her long ago. I 'want to see her' in the same fashion that I do Kate or Grace4 -- only more so. It will be very lonely without Father this week but I have planned a great deal that is to be done. I do hope Georgie5 will not send for me to pass next Sunday with her. I promised surely to go down as soon as she came home, and of course I wouldn't go this week. I have written her a letter to guard against the invitation's being sent, if possible. I did not go the other time that I promised and hardly like to disappoint her plans again. I am to go Friday and stay until Tuesday, and that would be out of the question when Mary has just arrived. Of course though, now I have written her she will not think of such a thing, but I feared I should have a letter from her before she got mine.
     I am overwhelmed at Miss Mathewson's ignorance of Miss Austen! How much pleasure she has to anticipate -- no -- I don't believe she would enjoy her stories much, do you? Particularly if she has Dumas and George Sand6 for her intimates. I don't think I remember Miss Austen very well, in spite of my fondness for her.7 It all comes back to me as I read, but I had forgotten the stories almost entirely and the last time I read them I do not remember so well as a year or two before and after. I think one reason was that they were nearly all the same kind of books (novels) and there is no effort about reading them. All the reasoning is done for you and all the thinking, as one might say. It seems to me like hearing somebody talk on and on and on, while you have no part in the conversation, and merely listen. I had a clear idea in my head when I started to tell you my 'views' but I find myself rather involved and consider that I had best leave it! But I have quite a grown-up feeling when I try to re-read some story I remember being absorbed in four or five years ago, and find I cannot get up any interest in it. Not that I have objections to a good novel now, by any means, but I do like other things too and am glad of it. I am glad Fannie8 likes 'the Alice book'9 -- it made a great impression on my mind, and I am anxious to read it again.
     We all dined at the Does'10 last Wednesday and had such a jolly time. The Judge is at home after quite a long absence. There is a prospect of another 'hostility' after Mary comes. Mrs. Edith is as anxious to see her as any of us.
     I am not very brilliant this evening, though Uncle William11 was here to tea and Charlotte and 'Lisha12 have been in since, and they were all agreeable. Oh dear! if one could only remember those letters one composes in bed o' nights! I know mine would be so entertaining that my friends would insist upon their 'being preserved in a volume!'13
     Carrie14 was glad you liked the mats. I am delighted that they are in fashion again, I always thought them so pretty. You know I do not usually appreciate fancy work!
     Love to Grandpa15 and 'our cousin' Prim.
     Yr. very aff.
     Sallie

     NOTES
     1 See Letters 2, note 3; 4, note 7.
     2 Caroline Frances Perry Jewett (see Genealogical Chart). In contrast to the many epistolary and literary tributes Miss Jewett paid her father, she said remarkably little about her mother outside of citing her illnesses and death.
     3 Miss Jewett's elder sister Mary Rice (see Genealogical Chart), to whom she dedicated A White Heron and Other Stories.
     4 Katherine Parker Gordon, wife of the postmaster of Boston, and her daughter Grace, who later married the Reverend Treadwell Walden, for many years rector of St. Paul's in Boston. Miss Jewett was a recurrent guest in the Gordon home at 5 Walnut Street during her teens and twenties.
     5 Georgina Halliburton (1849-1910), a lifelong friend of Miss Jewett from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was the daughter of Mrs. George Wallis Haven by her first husband, James Pierrepont Halliburton.
     6 Miss Jewett's adulation of the Frenchwoman lasted over the years. In May 1888 she ordered a copy of Mme. Sand's letters from a New York dealer (see Letter 31); in December she declared, "I am willing to study French very hard all winter in order to read her comfortably in the spring!" (Annie Fields, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett [Boston, 1911], 38); in 1890 she cried out ecstatically, "I really know Madame Sand," after reading her letter to Mme. d'Agoult (Fields, Letters, 75); and in 1893 she quoted from Sand's Légendes Rustiques to support her impassioned defense of provincial values (Preface to Deephaven).
     7Miss Jewett's attitude toward Jane Austen oscillated. In childhood she dodged her father's thoughtful recommendations of Sterne, Fielding, Smollett, and Cervantes for "the pleasant ways of Pride and Prejudice" ("Looking Back on Girlhood," Youth's Companion, LXV [January 7, 1892], 6). At the present juncture, Austen's attraction seems to have faded. In her fifties, the tug of nostalgia brought about another change of heart. "Yesterday afternoon I amused myself with Miss Austen's Persuasion. Dear me, how like her people are to the people we knew years ago! It is just as much New England before the war -- that is, in provincial towns -- as it ever was Old England. I am going to read another, Persuasion tasted so good!" (Fields, Letters, 185.)
     8 Frances Fiske Perry, daughter of Aunt Lucretia (see Genealogical Chart) was ten years old at this time and an omnivorous reader. Of serious tendency, she earned the soubriquet "Miss Prim," by which Miss Jewett alludes to her in the last line of the letter.
     9 In Frances Perry Dudley, The MidCentury in Exeter (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1943), Fannie observed that "The first copy of Alice in Wonderland to arrive in town was read by young and old until its binding was broken."
     10 The Honorable Charles Doe (1830-1896), appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire at 29, retained his rustic clothes and manners during sessions. A raconteur of uncommon facility, he punctuated his stories with earth-born phrases and laconic flashes of philosophic insight. Behind his rugged humors lay a vast kindliness and tolerance.
     His wife, Edith Haven Doe (1840-1922),formerly of Portsmouth, was the daughter of Mr. George Wallis Haven, and the stepsister of Georgia Halliburton. Of superior intelligence and engaging personality, she was renowned as a helpmeet and hostess. The Doe home at Rollinsford, a frequent anchorage for the Jewett sisters, was about a mile from their own.
     11 William Durham Jewett (1813-1887), her father's brother, conducted a diversity of business enterprises in South Berwick, dabbling in real estate, banking, law, and running a drugstore. A childless widower, he kept bachelor hall in the family dwelling which he inherited from his father, and generously indulged the three Jewett girls.
     12 Elisha Hanson Jewett (1816-1883), first cousin of Miss Jewett's father, was a prominent railroad and building contractor, a bank director and state senator from South Berwick. His first wife, also named Sarah Orne Jewett, was the daughter of his uncle and business associate. His current wife was Charlotte Tilton Cross.
    13This was not the first of Miss Jewett's faint intimations of immortality. Five years before she had speculated whimsically, "I think it would be funny if, a hundred years from now, some girl like me should find this diary somewhere and wonder about me. I guess I will write my journal with a view to your getting some improving information, young woman!" (Manuscript diary, Houghton Library, Harvard.)
    14Caroline Augusta, Miss Jewett's younger sister, who married Edwin C. Eastman, a South Berwick pharmacist (see Genealogical Chart). A Native of Winby and Other Tales is dedicated "To my dear younger sister, C. A. E."
     15 Dr. William Perry (see Genealogical Chart and headnote, Letter 21).



  4 LUCRETIA FISK PERRY

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 12, 1872

    Dear Aunty:

     Thank you so much for your letter which I read twice with great speed and interest and have referred to since, at intervals. I think you must have been sent into the world with a natural gift for writing letters!
     I have enjoyed myself today very much, for the Bishop1 preached in Dover this morning and Mary and I drove over to hear him, and were repaid by a very fine sermon -- and this afternoon he preached in Salmon Falls2 at the little old Episcopal church -- and everybody went to hear him and was delighted with him, and I was very proud of my Bishop. We had a nice talk with him after church and I think he will come over tomorrow to see us. He promised to do so if he had time.
     Only think of Uncle John's3 going abroad! If it were my Uncle Will4 I should 'put in' to be taken along. (Don't you think he would like to take charge of a party of ladies?) I wish very much to go travelling, and all the English history which I have been reading this winter makes me wish to go to England more than I ever have before. The Walworths sail next month and are to go directly to England and spend a great deal of time there, because Ella5 went there last, when she was abroad before, and could not see so much as she wished. She is coming down for a day or two before she goes. I shall not miss her particularly because she is always up to the mountains or somewhere in the summer and I never think of seeing her. And she will write me just as often, and much more interesting letters probably, so I am to be the gainer after all.
    Monday
     I did not finish my letter last evening as I intended because Uncle William6 and Father arrived from a journey to Wells, and I had to assist in giving them their late tea. Father went to Portsmouth this morning and then I went to Great Falls with him, and he was just on the point of starting for North Conway when he discovered the train does not go farther than Ossipee except in the morning, and so he must wait.7 I wish I could go with him -- for I am so fond of the mountains -- and it is so delightful to have them only three hours away, now this railroad has been extended. Mary and I mean to go up to Conway by and by.8
     I treasure up all you tell me about studying, and I really have accomplished a great deal lately. I have been translating a French novel, and find I had not forgotten so much as I feared. It was very entertaining and one night I threw down my dictionary; you see, I made a rule to 'look out' every word I didn't know, and read until very late at night, for it grew very exciting! I had great misgivings as to whether I ought not to go back and translate it all as literally as I began, but I had not the necessary strength of mind! Then I read a very nice book about ancient Iceland which I have finished, and I have now Ray's Mental Hygiene and Froude's History of Elizabeth, and a book on Instinct in Animals and Men which is one of the most interesting things I ever read, and I have learned so much from it. I wonder if I have told you that I allow myself a certain number of pages every day, of course exceeding if I like. I find the English history goes off very fast at fifty pages a day, at any rate, and sometimes a hundred, and I read one of the lectures on Instinct. Last week I had also, Loyola and the Jesuits,9which enlightened my mind a good deal. I am beginning at this late day to see the immense advantage of being systematic. Even the small success I have achieved in my 'lessons' has encouraged me, and I mean to keep on.
     Ellen Mason's10 busy ways made me ashamed of myself when I was with her, for she seemed to accomplish so much and I -- nothing. She appears both delighted and amazed at finding out that she has had an influence for good over me, for she says it is one of the defects of her character to be restless and 'on the go' all the time, and so her using her time more than other people do is more a weakness than anything else -- and it is so strange that she should have done me good. The girl doesn't take into consideration, you see, that she uses her time better than other people, only that she uses it more! I am having a very pleasant correspondence with her just now. I don't know whether it will be permanent but I enjoy it very much and she seems to, also. She sent me a very sweet letter at Easter which I answered and we have gone on flourishingly since -- though to be sure there have been one or two subjects under consideration, not very important subjects perhaps, but still we wished to communicate.
     I was in Portsmouth one day a week or two ago, and have been expecting Georgie up to Mrs. Doe's, but I believe Mrs. Haven11 has had visitors. Mary had quite a long letter from Uncle John today. There was no news in it except about some of Mary's and my friends there. I was quite astonished to find it was the fifteenth of June that he is to sail. I thought it was the fifteenth of May -- Wednesday! Mother has been better for the last two days and I hope she will have no return of her neuralgia but it has come on twice, after letting her alone for a day or two, which is very discouraging. She has been expecting to see Grandpa. We enjoyed Willy Fiske's12 little visit very much. I do think he is one of the nicest boys in the world.
     I had a note from Mr. Howellsl3 one day last week asking me to have patience with him, and saying that he should print "The Shore House" as soon as he possibly could. If he had not been so kind and seemed so sorry to keep me waiting I should have been provoked at waiting so long, but he has had good reasons all the time. But I know other people are kept waiting too, and people whom one would imagine would be 'served first.'14
     I have written you a long letter, but I am afraid not a very interesting one! Goodby my love to Fanny, and Grandpa, and Uncle Will, and yourself.
     Affly,
     S.O.J.
     Mary has just informed me that she wrote you today! You will have all the news! No matter!

     NOTES
     1 William Woodruff Niles (1832-1914), Canadian-born clergyman, became the second Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire in 1870. He demonstrated literary capacity as joint editor of the Churchman and as a member of the commissions for revising the prayer-book and the marginal readings in the Bible. Although born in a Congregationalist family, Miss Jewett was baptized and confirmed an Episcopalian in her twenty-first year.
     2 Dover, New Hampshire, is about five miles west of South Berwick; Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, about one-quarter of a mile from South Berwick, across the Salmon Falls River.
     3 John Taylor Perry was another of Miss Jewett's maternal uncles (see Genealogical Chart). After twenty-five years as editor and part owner of the Cincinnati Gazette, he returned to his birthplace, Exeter, New Hampshire, where he resided until his death. A shrewd judge of his niece's capacities, he wrote her on June 11, 1885: "Your forte lies in description. You can hardly improve there. Invention, on the other hand, is not your strongest point." Miss Jewett was well aware of this weakness, nevertheless let Charles Dudley Warner persuade her to write The Tory Lover, a novel notoriously deficient in "invention."
     4 Dr. William Gilman Perry, husband of Aunt Lucretia.
     5 Ella Walworth [Little] was one of Miss Jewett's young coterie of Boston friends which included Cora Clark, Elizabeth Fairchild, Grace Gordon, the Horsford sisters, and the Mason sisters.
     6 William Durham Jewett.
     7 Dr. Jewett practiced medicine in South Berwick and vicinity for many years. A graduate of Jefferson Medical College, he became professor of obstetrics at Bowdoin College, consulting surgeon to Maine General Hospital, President of the Maine Medical Association, and contributor of distinguished articles to the scientific journals. Miss Jewett recreated him affectionately in A County Doctor.
    8 Wells is on the southern coast of Maine; Portsmouth is New Hampshire's famous seaport and summer resort; Great Falls, a small mill city on Salmon Falls River, is (since 1893) Somersworth, New Hampshire, connected by bridge with Berwick, Maine; Conway, North Conway, and Ossipee are in the heart of the White Mountain range in New Hampshire (for more about this region see Letter 55, note 2).
     9 The book about ancient Iceland is possibly The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (London, 1870), translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris. The other books are Isaac Ray, Mental Hygiene (Boston, 1863); James Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth (London, 1856-1870, 12 vols.; P. A. Chadbourne, Instinct: Its Office in the Animal Kingdom and its Relation to Higher Powers in Man (New York, 1872); Stewart Rose, Ignatius Loyola, and the Early Jesuits (London, 1870).
    10 Ellen Francis Mason (1846-1930) and her sister Ida resided at the corner of Walnut and Beacon streets. Of substantial means, Miss Mason was seriously devoted to charitable purposes and promoted Boston culture through her patronage of music and musicians. The sisters shuttled between Beacon Hill and Newport, often inviting Miss Jewett to their homes in both places.
     11 Susan Hamilton Peters Haven (Mrs. George Wallis Haven), mother of Georgina Halliburton, was a descendant of the John Haggins who built and originally occupied the Jewett house in south Berwick.
    12Mrs. Perry's nephew William Perry Fiske was the son of her brother Frank Fiske, who had married Abigail G. Perry (see Genealogical Chart). Some members of this family used the final e in the cognomen, some did not.
    13William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881. An assistant to James T. Fields, Howells was "the Editor with the fine handwriting" who accepted Miss Jewett's "Mr. Bruce," her first story to appear in the Atlantic. Later he urged her to make a collection of her stories and gave her an introductory letter to James R. Osgood, publisher-partner of Fields. The result was Deephaven. Miss Jewett often called at the Howells' Boston menage on Berkeley Street and was a familiar dinner guest. Howells became enamored of Maine after spending a summer at York harbor, built a cottage at Kittery Point, and exchanged visits with Miss Jewett in summer and fall, going by way of the now extinct Portsmouth, Dover & York trolley line.
    14The sketch appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, XXXII (September 1873), 358-368. Upon reading it, Aunt Lucretia wrote: "I do not think I ever have told you how much I enjoyed your lifelike 'Shore House.' It was as full of good things as a Christmas pudding, of plums, and I liked nearly as well your very graphic account of your visit to the old women in Kittery, in Mary's letter. You have that charm of naturalness in telling your stories, which seems so easy, yet is so impossible to catch if one is not to the manner born. I hope you will always stick to your own style."



  5 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     July 1, 1873

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     You have always been so kind to me that I cannot help thinking of you as one of my friends, and I have a question to ask which I am sure you will be able to answer. So I ask it without making elaborate apologies. Will you tell me about keeping the copyright of my stories? Someone asked me not long ago if I would like to have them published in book form, and, though I did not care to tell him 'yes,' it has suggested to me that perhaps I might like to have someone else take them one of these days. And I know there is something about a thing's being 'copyrighted' or not, which may hinder their being used over again. At any rate, I should like to know if there is anything for me to do about it.
     I have been writing for the Independent since I saw you.1 Not very much, however, for I don't think I need the practice of writing so much as I need study, and care in other ways. I think you advised me long ago not to write too much, or to grow careless? I am getting quite ambitious and really feel that writing is my work -- my business perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it as I used.
     I sent you some sketches I gave a paper published at our Hospital Fair in Portland, not long ago.2 I am really trying to be very much in earnest and to do the best I can, and I know you will wish me 'good luck.' I have had nothing to complain of, for the editors have never proved to be dragons, and I even find I have achieved a small reputation already. I am glad to have something to do in the world and something which may prove very helpful and useful if I care to make it so, which I certainly do. But I am disposed to long-windedness! If you will tell me with the least possible trouble to yourself how I can have my stories copyrighted, or 'keep the copyright' I believe one should say -- or if it is not necessary, I shall thank you exceedingly, both for that and for your other kindnesses.
      Yrs very sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Between September 14, 1871, and May 8, 1873, Miss Jewett contributed nine pieces to the Independent (see Weber & Weber, Bibliography, 30-31).
    2Three sketches appeared in The Tonic (Portland, Maine) in 1873: "Birds' Nests," June 11, page 3; "Doctors and Patients," June 12, page 3; "Protoplasm and House-Cleaning," June 17, page 3.



6 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     July 13, 1873

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     In the first place, I think this letter will need no answer. Does not this announcement help you to begin to read it with a pleasanter feeling? The truth is I wish to talk to you a little about my writing. I am more than glad to have you criticise me. I know I must need it very much and I realize the disadvantage of never hearing anything about my stories except from my friends, who do not write themselves, and are not unexceptionable authorities upon any strictly literary question. I do know several literary people quite well, but whenever they read anything of mine I know that they look down from their pinnacles in a benignant way and think it very well done 'for her,' as the country people say. And all this is not what I want. Then it is a disadvantage that I should have been so successful in getting my nonsense printed!
     I am so glad to have you show me where I fail, for I wish to gain as fast as possible and I must know definitely what to do. But Mr. Scudder, I think my chief fault is my being too young and knowing so little! Those sketches I sent you were carefully written. Of course they were experiments and I could perhaps have made them better if they could have been longer. Those first stories of mine were written with as little thought and care as one could possibly give and write them at all. Lately I have chosen my words and revised as well as I knew how; though I always write impulsively -- very fast and without much plan. And, strange to say, this same fault shows itself in my painting, for the more I worked over pictures the stiffer and more hopeless they grew. I have one or two little marine views I scratched off to use up paint and they are bright and real and have an individuality -- just as the "Cannon Dresses"1 did. That is the dearest and best thing I have ever written. "The Shore House," which Mr. Howells has,2 reminds me of it and comes next. I wrote it in the same way and I think it has the same reality. I believe the only thing he found fault with was that I did not make more of it. 'The characters were good enough for me to say a great deal more of them.'
     But I don't believe I could write a long story as he suggested, and you advise me in this last letter. In the first place, I have no dramatic talent. The story would have no plot. I should have to fill it out with descriptions of character and meditations. It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play! I could write you entertaining letters perhaps, from some desirable house where I was in most charming company, but I couldn't make a story about it. I seem to get very much bewildered when I try to make these come in for secondary parts. And what shall be done with such a girl? For I wish to keep on writing, and to do the very best I can.
     It is rather discouraging to find I lose my best manner by studying hard and growing older and wiser! Copying one's self has usually proved disastrous. Shall not I let myself alone and not try definitely for this trick of speech or that, and hope that I shall grow into a sufficient respectability as the years go on? I do not know how much real talent I have as yet, how much there is in me to be relied upon as original and effective in writing. I am certain I could not write one of the usual magazine stories. If the editors will take the sketchy kind and people like to read them, is not it as well to do that and do it successfully as to make hopeless efforts to achieve something in another line which runs much higher? You know the spirit in which I say this, for you know my writing has until very lately been done merely for the pleasure of it. It is not a bread and butter affair with me, though such a spendthrift as I could not fail to be glad of money, which has in most instances been lightly earned. I don't wish to ignore such a gift as this, God has given me. I have not the slightest conceit on account of it, indeed, I believe it frightens me more than it pleases me.
     Now it has been a great satisfaction to have said all this to you. Please look upon it as a slight tribute to your critical merits which no one can appreciate more heartily than I, and remember that I told you in the beginning there would be no questions which would need answering.
     Thank you for telling me of your engagement, though I had heard of it long ago from some Boston friend and I had half a mind to speak of it when I was writing you. I am very glad now to send you my best wishes. I shall like exceedingly to see Miss Owen,3 and I congratulate you both with all my heart.
     Yours most sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "The Girl With the Cannon Dresses," Riverside Magazine, IV (August 1870), 354-360.
     2 At long last the story found its way into the Atlantic Monthly, XXXII (September 1873), 358-368; collected in Deephaven.
     3 Miss Grace Owen (1845-1926) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, whom Scudder married later in the year.



7 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     August 12, 1873

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     Your kind note reached me yesterday, and I thank you most heartily for telling me that you liked "Deephaven Cronies."1 You have always been exceedingly helpful and kind to me and I assure you I am not disposed to be unmindful of it, or to forget how much interest you have shown in my work. I am so glad that the sketch pleases you and so glad that you cared to tell me so! I mean to do the best I can and I am growing more and more interested in my writing every week. I have not seen the sketch yet, but no doubt the magazine will be published in a few days.
     I should be very glad to see you again and I wish I knew Mrs. Scudder. When I am in Boston next winter I shall be glad to accept your kind invitation and shall certainly 'make a point' of calling at No. 3 Berkeley St.
     It is very pleasant to have your praise but I should be equally glad to be warned and reproved when you find occasion. I am glad you are writing again, as glad as I was sorry that you stopped.
     Yours most sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1Atlantic Monthly, XXXVI (September 1875), 316-329; collected in Deephaven.


8 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     September 14, 1876

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     My name is Sarah Orne Jewett, if you please; and when you are arranging the Index, can you credit a story to me which was called "Mr. Bruce" and printed in the Atlantic for December 1869?1
     So much for business which properly ought to come before my saying how much pleasure it has given me to hear from you again and to know something about you. Indeed I do wish very much to see you sometime in Cambridge and I hope to manage it this autumn certainly, but hitherto I have just gone out from Boston with not half enough time for what I had to do, and I have been meaning to make certain calls and have unfailingly put them off, for a long time. I was not in town last winter except for very short visits.
     Shirley2 must be very pleasant, but what do you do in that small room of yours when you are tired with writing and wish to stretch your arms, or don't you appreciate the satisfaction of that? I am sorry your little girl has been ill, and I hope she is already a great deal better.
     No, I haven't dug a clam all summer, for what with the Centennial3 and a visit to N. Y. in June, and the house filled with visitors ever since we came home in July, I have only been down to the Shore half a dozen times and only for the day, which doesn't count with me. But I am going down directly to spend a week, and then I know where to go for those clams and where to get an old dory with as many leaks as a basket, and I know where the cunners hold county conferences out in the harbour, where two other little boys and I caught a hundred and thirty in just no time at all one day last summer. This is all in York which reminds me of my dear Deephaven though that was 'made up' before I had ever stayed overnight in York, or knew and loved it as I do now. Since "The Shore House" was written I have identified Deephaven with it more and more. Still I don't like to have people say that I mean York when I say Deephaven.4
     I should like to see you and have a long talk and I hope I shall one of these days.
     I am having such a good time just now out of doors: this morning I have been rowing down river, yesterday I went up Agamenticus and could see seventy miles of seacoast and all the White Hills, and two days ago I went to the Cliff,5 which is a place you ought to see.
     Please give my regards to Mrs. Scudder whom I am hoping to know.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1The Atlantic Monthly Index, 1857-1876 was being prepared and Miss Jewett, having outgrown her passion for pseudonyms, wished to set the record straight (see Letter 1, note 3).
     2 Near Fitchburg, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Scudder spent the summer in a house owned by the Shakers. Scudder joined her from time to time as work would allow.
     3 The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, which served as a basis for "The Flight of Betsey Lane."
     4 Miss Jewett's "Deephaven" corresponds roughly with York County, Maine's southernmost triangular tip, but she consistently resisted exact identification. See also her prefaces to Deephaven, editions of 1877 and 1893; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess (Boston, 1922), 300; and Letters 30; 96, note 3.
     5 Mount Agamenticus is the highest hill in the relatively low region of southern Maine between Cape Neddick and Ogunquit; White Hills is a localism for the White Mountain range of New Hampshire; Bald Head Cliff is at Ogunquit on the southern coast of Maine.



9 JAMES R. OSGOOD
     James Ripley Osgood (1836-1892), of Fryeburg, Maine, was first a clerk for Ticknor & Fields, then by several steps partner and owner of the publishing house -- James R. Osgood & Company -- which eventually became Houghton Mifflin Company. In 1885 Osgood went to England as agent of Harper & Brothers, but soon founded his own firm there. Active and enterprising, Osgood published nearly all the outstanding American and British authors of his time. He had a hand in the issuance of Miss Jewett's first three books.

     South Berwick, Maine
     April 9, 1877

    My dear Mr. Osgood:

     I think Deephaven1 is very pretty, a great deal prettier than I had thought it was going to be! Don't you like it? I like especially the little 'die' on the back which I had not seen before.2
     I send you a notice which came from the Christian Union and the longer one from the N. Y. Herald. At least I suppose it came from that, for it is exactly the same type &c. Someone sent it to me in a letter. Will you be good enough to keep it for me with the other notices, for I should like to save them. I think it would be a good plan to send an advance copy to the Cincinnati Gazette, to Mr. Perry who is my uncle,3 and who ought to speak a good word for Deephaven, indeed I'm pretty sure he will! The paper has a large circulation in that part of the country. I find I appreciate my relationship to an Editor, in a marked degree just now!
     Was not a copy to be sent to the Advertiser early? or to Miss Preston?4 I know you told me that Mr. Whitney spoke of some plan. I never have asked Miss Preston to write a notice, but I know her very well and if nothing has been arranged I will send her one of my copies and will ask her.
     I should like the 25 copies very much, and will you please have them sent by Goodwin's Ex., 10 Court Square.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1Deephaven, Miss Jewett's first work published as a volume, appeared in this year and brought her wide public acclaim as an authentic delineator of her special region.
     2 A triad of cat-tails in gilt on the spine of the first edition between her name and the publisher's device.
     3 John Taylor Perry (see Letter 4, note 3).
     4 Harriet Waters Preston (1836-1911), a scholar in the field of Provençal poetry, a translator, novelist, and editor of considerable ability. She wrote reviews and critiques for numerous periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly. Miss Jewett's enthusiasm for Matthew Arnold had its origin in Miss Preston's appraisal of his poems. Their friendship was renewed when their itineraries crossed in Florence during Miss Jewett's first trip to Europe in 1882.


10 CHARLES ASHBURTON GILMAN
     Charles Ashburton Gilman (1859-1938), son of Charles Jervis and Alice Dunlap Gilman, was a cousin of Miss Jewett who lived in Brunswick, Maine. A gregarious, happy-go-lucky youth, he sought no profession, dabbling lightly in local politics, and remained a community favorite to his last days.

    South Berwick, Maine
     May 9, 1877

    My dear Charlie:

     I have just come home from a very pleasant day in Portsmouth with Miss Halliburton, who told me to tell you with her kind regards how very sorry she was to miss your call yesterday. I am so sorry too that you did not see her, for I know you would have had a pleasant call, and have certainly found her very glad to see you.
     We went to Newcastle today and had such a jolly time, I wish you had been with us. It is not nice weather for a picnic, but we went to a house which Mr. Haven1 owns and had a big fire in a fireplace and a very good time, with a walk along the rocks and beach after dinner.
     I hope you had a good time in Boston and you must tell me about it. I received your postal card and should have answered it, but I have been busy and there was not very much news. I have nearly finished the survey of the Sunday-school books. The new ones have been very entertaining for we have had them here in the dining room for a week or two. I gave Susy Jewett2 your goodbye message, and she was sorry not to have seen you again, and said many pleasant things about you. Carrie is better but not nearly well yet. We all enjoyed your visit and you don't know how much I missed you Charlie!3
     With love to Cousin Fanny.
     Yours always sincerely & affly,
     Sarah

     NOTES
     1 George Wallis Haven, scion of an old Portsmouth family, and described as "a scholarly gentleman of leisure and some means," was the father of Edith Haven Doe and stepfather of Georgina Halliburton.
     2 Susan Jameson Jewett of South Berwick was the daughter of Elisha Hanson Jewett (see Letter 3, note 12).
     3 The next day Miss Jewett wrote to Anna Laurens Dawes about her cousin: "He's such a nice fellow, and we are great friends. I used not to like him, and it is delightful to find him so nice as he grows up. He would not thank me for giving you the impression that he is young. It falls very sweet upon his ear to be called Mr. Gilman and I never shall tell that he is at home an underrated younger brother and only 'Charley.' " And on October 11: "I made a little visit down at Brunswick and had a lovely time with my young cousin Charley - dear little fellow (or big fellow!). He has grown so this summer and he is trying very hard to be a good man." (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)



11 IDA AGASSIZ HIGGINSON
     Ida Agassiz Higginson (1837-1935) was the daughter of Jean Louis Agassiz, the naturalist. Primarily interested in education and music, she was associated with her stepmother, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, in the establishment and development of Radcliffe College (see Letter 103, note 2), and with her husband, Henry Lee Higginson, founder-patron of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Miss Jewett enjoyed the hospitality of the Higginsons at their summer home, Sunset Hill, in West Manchester, Massachusetts, and often sailed with them off Cape Ann.

     South Berwick, Maine
     June 2, 1877

    My dear Mrs. Higginson:

     You have not the least idea how much pleasure your letter has given me. Thank you with all my heart for your kindness in writing me. I hoped you would like little Deephaven, but I do not know what to say when you give it such high praise. I am very glad to have pleased you, that is certain! It is all vague enough when I read about the book in the newspapers but it is a real delight to know that my friends like what I have done, and some of the letters which have come to me lately I shall always keep among my dearest treasures.1
     You said one thing in your letter which made me very glad: that you thought I had not made country people ridiculous. I should have been so sorry if I had done that, for I have always liked my outdoor life best, and in driving about ever since I can remember with my father, who is a doctor, I have grown more and more fond of the old-fashioned countryfolks. I have always known their ways and I like to be with them. Deephaven is not the result of careful study during one 'summer vacation,' as some persons have thought, but I could write it because it is the fashion of life with which I have always been familiar. I think no part of New England can possibly have kept more of the last century's way of thinking and speaking than this. Berwick itself is growing and flourishing in a way that breaks my heart, but out from the village among the hills and near the sea there are still the quietest farms, where I see little change from one year to another, and the people would delight your heart.2
     And as for the sailors, I have always known them. Nobody knows how I love the sea, and many of my friends have been and are sailors in either the navy or the merchant service, and until a few years ago we had much to do with ships. When I was a child the Captains used to come to see my grandfather3 and I thought if I could go off on a voyage I should be perfectly happy.
     Deephaven seems as real to me as Berwick or Newport. I know all the roads and all the houses there, and I believe I could answer all the questions about it that anyone could ask.
     I beg your pardon for this letter, dear Mrs. Higginson, because it is altogether too long. I wished to write you at once, and I think of so many things to say. I have always remembered my two calls with the greatest pleasure. Please let me thank you again for your kindness and interest, and believe that I am always
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 True to her sentiment, Miss Jewett did preserve this early letter which is now in Houghton Library. Mrs. Higginson enjoyed particularly the description of the old church in this "delicious little book" which reminded her of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, except that she considered Deephaven "very superior to it."
     2 Basically conservative and in love with the old ways and days, Miss Jewett deplored the drastic change that was affecting the once idyllic Berwick area. South Berwick was originally an inland riverport to which fleets of quaint, flat-bottomed gundalows brought cargoes of rum, molasses, sugar, and tea from the huge West Indies vessels docked at Portsmouth. Lumber, fish, hay, and country produce hauled by oxen from as far away as Vermont were taken in exchange. During the Civil War period and thereafter, this atmosphere of barter gradually gave way to the smoke and clangor of cotton and woolen mills. By 1877 shipping was no longer the major occupation of the region.
     3 Theodore Furber Jewett (see Genealogical Chart), "a citizen of the whole geography," led a life of affairs and hazards which appealed to Miss Jewett's early romantic drift. Bound out as a boy, he ran away and shipped aboard a whaler. With only two companions, he was left for over eight months on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean to guard stores and secure seals. He returned to New England, became a sea captain, ran a vessel to the West Indies at the height of the Embargo, was captured by the British and confined on the infamous Dartmoor Prison Ship. He turned to the less turbulent occupation of shipbuilding, married four times, and finally retired as a merchant. In his declining years he maintained the "W. I. Store" on Main Street in South Berwick, a multifarious general store replete with potbelly stove and cracker barrel. Here gathered daily the Captain's cronies, veterans of the seven seas, to spin the prodigious yarns which the child Sarah absorbed with undiminishing wonder.


12 JAMES R. OSGOOD
     South Berwick, Maine
     August 16, 1877

    Dear Sir:

     Cannot I have the rest of the notices of Deephaven now if you are done using them? There are a great many that I have not seen and I shall thank you very much if you will take the trouble to send them.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett


13 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN
     Mrs. Alice Dunlap Gilman (1827-1905), the mother of the Brunswick Gilman family, was related to Miss Jewett through the marriage of Sarah's grandfather Dr. William Perry to Abigail Gilman (see Genealogical Chart). Alice Gilman counted a college president, one of George Washington's generals, and a governor of Maine in her lineage.


    South Berwick, Maine
     October 10, 1877

    Dear Cousin Alice:

     Isn't it a good day for the fair?1 and don't I wish I were there!
     I reached home all right but in the midst of a pouring rain. Mary was to have been here at three, but she did not show herself, so we are looking for her this morning. Father and mother are very well but I think they have been rather lonely, and we sat up late last night talking for I had so much to tell about my visit. You don't know how much I enjoyed it, or how much I thank you and all the rest for your very great kindness to me. I shall have so many pleasant things to remember, and I hope you will all come here before very long, and that I can do something for you.
     As for the horse, in which I take it for granted you have some interest, I am sorry to say he is not here yet so I have to wait another day. It is not much matter because it is so muddy today, but I want to see how he looks.2
    Father is away today and I think I shall give the horses a little exercise after I unpack my trunk. I wish Charlie was here for I owe him some splendid drives and I shouldn't mind paying up at all. Tell Liddy3 that I have lost some valuable time this morning because I had to sit right down and read the Mother's Magazine.4 I had a lot of letters to read last night and one was from the editor of a new magazine5 asking me to write for it, so I don't believe I am likely to want business this winter with all the rest I have to do!
     Tell Aunty that she shall have the poem in a few days.
     I keep thinking of the fair and wishing I could go. I am so glad it doesn't rain, and I shall look anxiously for the Telegraph. Mother says the receipt for the "pepper-tomato" is to take the tomatoes and put them in hot water a little while so they will peel very easily and then put them in a kettle without any water and the proportion is three pounds of sugar to four pounds of fruit. Boil them until they get dark and thick (almost all day, I guess) and put in cayenne pepper as strong as you like it. Mother is in the midst of grape jelly and there are some things for me to do for her, so I must say goodby with ever and ever so much love to you and all the family.6
     From your sincere and aff
     Sarah

     NOTES
     1 The annual Sagadahoc County Fair at Topsham, Maine.
     2 Miss Jewett's interest in horseflesh had a long history, beginning with her childhood admiration for the horses that drew her father's buggy in his rounds of backwoods and seacoast patients. As soon as she was old enough she instituted regular afternoon drives, leading to association with a long series of spanking equines. She even contemplated driving from South Berwick to Boston, but there is no record that she ever consummated this project. It is somehow portentous that her death was brought about indirectly by a beloved horse who unseated her in a moment of clumsiness or panic.
     3 Mrs. Gilman's daughter Elizabeth (see headnote, Letter 97).
     4 Mother's Magazine, published in New York from 1833 to 1888, was at this time edited by a minister and bore heavily upon the Sabbath and scripture. Although it printed periodical reports of the Maternal Association, it was "not for mothers any more than for women in general," and was widely read for its stories, poems, and special features.
     5 The Sunday Afternoon, published in Springfield, Massachusetts, and edited in its first year by Washington Gladden. Miss Jewett contributed four stories and two poems to its pages between January 1878 and July 1879. Two more of her stories appeared after its name was changed to Good Company.
    6 For additional data on the Gilman family, see Richard Cary, "Jewett's Cousins Charles and Charlie," Colby Library Quarterly, V (September 1959), 48-58; and "Jewett and the Gilman Women," V (March 1960), 94-103.


14 CHARLES ASHBURTON GILMAN

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 16, 1877

    Dear Charlie:

     I have been meaning to write to you ever since I came home but I have not found time. I went to Boston the second morning after I left Brunswick and bought the chestnut horse which I like very much. Mary says she likes it better than the others she saw, and, so far, everything seems right about it. I don't know that I ever saw a prettier creature -- she's a thoroughbred and it was a great piece of good luck that Mr. Chamberlain happened to get her. I found out all about her, and who had owned her, etc. She knows me already and follows me all round after apples and sugar. I just wish you were here and could go out to see her for yourself. I think I shall enjoy her ever so much.1
     I did have such a good time in Boston. I went to see Mr. Osgood, and did some other errands and then went up to the Gordons, where I found that Ellen Mason and several other friends of mine were in town from Newport and were all at Ellen's. You can guess that I whisked in and that I was persuaded to send a telegram home and to stay overnight. I stayed with Grace but I spent the evening with the other girls and we had a jolly time. I wish you had been with us! We went to see Heller the magician and you never saw such things as he did! I hurried home the next day at noon for I thought that Miss Preston was coming but I found she was obliged to put it off until a week or so later, and that neither Mrs. Ellis nor Mrs. Furber could come so soon as we had planned, and that even the dressmaker was belated! So we are alone this week after all, but I find a good deal to do.
     Yesterday I went to York With John2 to get the old chair I told you about, and I had a very nice time. We 'took' our dinner and went over on Cape Neddick exploring the pastures and in one place we drove over a stone wall! We had General in the little open buggy, and the wall had fallen down considerably just there! I should like to take you where we went, some day. It was not quite so wild as Orr's Island but it was wild enough. York is such a nice old place -- I mean to go down again for the day, before cold weather. I hope you will 'happen along' soon.
     It was too bad there was so much rainy weather in 'fair time' but I hope it didn't hinder all the pleasure and that you had no end of fun. I thought of you ever so much while I was in Boston. I long to see the Telegraph to hear about the premiums.3
     I did have such a nice time in Brunswick. I remember it every day, and especially Orr's Island, and you will not be surprised to hear that I have been reading The Pearl over again to refresh my memory.4
     By the way, Charlie, did you ever read a book called Tom Brown at Rugby? It is one of the books I like best, and I think you would. Perhaps you won't like the first chapter very well, but you get Tom started at school, and you see if you don't read all the rest! I don't know a jollier or a better book.5
     I wish I could spend this afternoon at your house. Do give my love to all the family. I suppose Cousin Alice got my letter but I want to say again what a good time I had and how kind you all were. Now write to me as soon as you can and remember you are coming to see us.
     Yours lovingly,
     Sarah
     I just had a letter from Mrs. Claflin6 asking me to make her a visit with Miss Phelps the authoress.7 Wouldn't it be nice? but I can't very well accept, and my friends want me again to come down to Newport, which would also be great fun if I could leave home.
     I send these patterns of a dress I got, to your mother -- not to you!

     NOTES
     1 On October 11 Miss Jewett had written to Anna Laurens Dawes: "In Boston I bought myself a lovable saddle-horse, a chestnut thoroughbred that goes like the wind, and is so far satisfactory in every way. I call her Sheila for the Princess of Thule -- is it not a good name?" (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress) Later Miss Jewett averred that she pronounced it Shy-la "because she occasionally shies."
     2 John Tucker (1845-1902), of Kittery, Maine, came to work for Dr. Jewett as "temporary" hostler in 1875 and remained until his death. A loyal and trustworthy man, he was granted increasing responsibility in household affairs and became practically indispensable to the entire family.
     3 In point of fact the opening day of the Sagadahoc County Fair was postponed on account of inclement weather, and attendance on the following morning was disappointingly slim. However, there was compensation in the awards Mr. Gilman accumulated: two first prizes in the cow and heifer competitions, a first and second prize for full-blooded sheep, and a second prize in poultry for his Plymouth Rock.
     4 Orr's Island is off the Maine coast, some twelve miles from Brunswick. Miss Jewett first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Pearl of Orr's Island (Boston, 1862) when she was thirteen or fourteen, and on a number of occasions in print avowed the influence that it had on her own literary career.
     5 Miss Jewett's recommendation of Thomas Hughes's 1857 novel of English school life and "muscular Christianity" -- Tom Brown's School Days -- is in line with her solemn monitions to this gay-hearted young cousin (see Letter 15).
     6 Mary Bucklin Davenport Claflin (1825-1896), second wife of Governor William Claflin of Massachusetts, published three books of belles-lettres on New England life, and Personal Recollections of John G. Whittier.
    7 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (see Letter 62, note 3).


15 CHARLES ASHBURTON GILMAN

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 23, 1877
     Dear Charlie:

     I send you this little lettercase hoping you will find it as useful as I have found one just like it. Mine is nearly worn out now. I was very glad to get your letter and wish I could send you a long one in reply but I must put off writing anything but a note, for I have several notes to write today and not much time.
     I hope you will have a 'Merrie Christmas' and a most happy one too, dear Charlie, and that you will try to make it a pleasant day for somebody else. I am very sure you will do this, for I think you do not forget other people. I should like to see you and to hear all about what you are doing, your lessons and your friends and what is going on. I was very glad to get your letter, and I wish you could write oftener, but I know it is hard to find time for letters.
     We were very sorry to hear of David's1 accident and hope he is gaining very fast. Mother and Carrie have been in Exeter this week but returned yesterday. Thursday was Grandpa's eighty-ninth birthday.
     Please give my love and good wishes to all the family and with a great deal of love for yourself.
     I am always your sincerely and affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 David Dunlap Gilman (1854-1914), Charles's elder brother, was a paymaster at the Cabot mill.


16 CHARLES ASHBURTON GILMAN

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 14, 1878

    My dear Charley:

     I hope you do not think I have forgotten I owe you for that nice letter which I received just after I went to Washington. I was so glad to hear from you and I have meant to answer it a good many times but, as you will imagine, I have had very little chance for writing while I was away and since I came home I have been very busy.
     You do not know what splendid times I have had. All my visits were very pleasant, but I enjoyed so much being in Washington. There is so much to interest anybody and I was going all the time from morning until night and pretty late at night too! I was there nearly two months and I would not have missed it for anything. How much I shall enjoy telling you of my frolics when I see you, which I hope will not be a great while hence.
     Amt Helen1 was here the other day and I told her of the plan we made to meet in Portland at the time of the Poultry Show. She laughed and said she hoped we would sometime. I wonder if you really went and if you had a good time?
     You don't know how glad I was to get home again, and I believe home never seemed so pleasant. My horse goes splendidly and I have had some splendid long rides after I finish writing in the afternoon.2 I went to work again as soon as I could and have already done a good deal of writing, though the first week I was at home it was so cold and damp that it played the mischief with me and I had the rheumatism, which seemed very natural indeed!
     I have so much to tell about and I am not nearly talked out yet either.
     Please tell your mother how sorry I am not to have been at home when she made her visit, for all the family enjoyed it so much. Carrie has been writing Lizzie and I suppose she told all the news. Do write soon, and with love to Lizzie and Dave, believe me your loving cousin
     Sarah
     Have you heard any news from Orr's Island, and how is Miss Ballard? Please give her my love.

     NOTES
     1 Mrs. Helen Williams Gilman (1817-1905), daughter of the noted Maine lawyer and U.S. Senator, Reuel Williams, was esteemed for her philanthropies, civic activity, and personal congeniality.
     2 On the same day Miss Jewett wrote to Anna Laurens Dawes: "You don't know how much I enjoy 'Sheila' who is better than ever -- and high as a kite. I began to think she had gone back to her colthood and must be disciplined and broken anew. But I am luckily very strong and Sheila knows I mean to be captain." (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)


17 HENRY MILLS ALDEN
     Henry Mills Alden (1836-1919)was managing editor of Harper's Weekly from 1863 to 1869, and editor of Harper's Magazine from 1869 to his death.


     South Berwick, Maine
     June 21, [1879]

    Dear Sir:

     I enclose some verses1 though I think you may say you have enough of my writing already.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1"A Night in June," identified by a notation on page 4 of the letter. Alden rejected the poem and it was later published in the Christian Union, XXII (July 7, 1880), 4.



18 HENRY MILLS ALDEN
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     February 19, 1880

    My dear Mr. Alden:

     I am going to do something which I never did before and which if I had thought about it at all I should have said I could not do, but I wish you would print that sketch.1 Of course, in a general way an author is always supposed to be in an anxious state to have such a thing happen but I beg you will not believe that I am sensitively confident of my rights! or that I am begging for the money my work will bring. For I have money enough and I suppose I could get the sketch printed elsewhere -- in fact, I am very sure of that.2 But it is just here: I wish to keep the two together, they have always belonged to each other3 -- which feeling I am sure you will understand -- and I read them at two clubs which united them still more closely, and though one club was in Portsmouth, which dear old town is not distinguished as being literary!
     I found to my surprise that almost everybody liked the horse sketch1best, people whom I thought (to tell the truth) I might be boring with it. And I don't believe it would be out of place in Harper's. I have been brought up to read Harper's, and I wouldn't have sent it to you in that case, though I hesitated at first from knowing that you already had two of my sketches, and though I meant at first to ask you to send me back "The Jacqueminot Rose"4 and take this instead because it is so much better.
     I don't believe I have the usual authorly feeling about what I write. I think about my sketches very much as I do about other people's. And I wish you would change your mind, for I am pretty sure you would not be sorry for it.5 I know that at least a hundred people told me how much they liked it, or told others so, and I think they were a fair sample of your readers. I am very glad you like it yourself, and I thank you for your letter which was very kind. And I hope I am not annoying you now, but I couldn't help speaking as I have because I believe it so heartily.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "An October Ride."
     2 Miss Jewett had already appeared over fifty times in newspapers and magazines, and had had three books published: Deephaven, Play Days, and Old Friends and New.
     3 "An October Ride" and "Miss Daniel Gunn."
     4 She had evidently submitted two prose sketches, "The Jacqueminot Rose" and "Miss Daniel Gunn." Alden presently sent the "Rose" back and Miss Jewett seems never to have succeeded in getting it published. When she received the rejected manuscript, she sent Alden a third sketch entitled "An October Ride." This too he declined but printed the "Gunn" story under the title "An Autumn Holiday," Harper's, LXI (October 1880), 683-691; collected in Country By-Ways.
     5 Across the corner of the first page of Miss Jewett's letter, Alden wrote: "I ask to reconsider," and appended his initials.


19 HENRY MILLS ALDEN

     South Berwick, Maine
     February 23, 1880

    Dear Mr. Alden:

     I send you the sketch,1 though I have been thinking that it would be better not, and I must say that you are very good to take so much trouble about it. I have been reading it over for I thought I might not remember it exactly, and seeing it now might change the old impression of it. But I must say honestly that I like it still! and I think in some ways it is one of the very best bits of writing I have ever done. There is more in it to remember and though there are no 'characters,' it has the spirit of this part of the country. But the question is, I can see, whether it will give pleasure to a sufficiently large proportion of the people who would read it.2
     There is one point in its favour which I never thought of before: and that is, a sketch which has something to say about a girl's 'rough-riding' is a little of a novelty in magazine literature. This has at least the virtue of being true, of my horse,3 the 'farm' and the old parsonage -- which is more than I can say for my sketches usually. Isn't it a curious thing that most people who read the two would probably call this made-up, and the one which you already have, drawn from life?
     I am afraid I said some odd things in my first letter about my two small audiences, but I meant that I was not trusting alone to my highly critical friends in Boston, because what many of those would like would be pretty sure not to be 'popular.' But the second time I read the sketch, my friends were mostly people who like to be entertained better than to be puzzled, and I thought both together would be a fair example to judge by. And I couldn't be 'taken in' by the polite speeches which anybody tried to make to me out of kindness alone! But I have made my 'last appearance on any stage' unlike my New York namesake.4
     I hope to be in New York for a day or two either just before or just after Easter, and I should be very glad indeed to see you, and I hope nothing will happen to prevent it. I am glad just now that we never have met, for I should be sorry if I ever thought that any personal feeling hindered the sway of justice (which ought to have been written with a very big J!).
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     Indeed my heart will not break this time and you must not think of that at any rate!5 I am so glad that Mrs. Alden likes my stories! I am always forgetting that anyone reads them except the people I know, and it is always a delight and surprise to find a new friend. I hope you will pardon this postscript to my long and unbusiness-like letter.

     NOTES
     1 "An October Ride."
     2 Alden duly reconsidered the sketch, fortified his opinion that it would not do for Harper's and declined it again. But Miss Jewett, equally convinced that it deserved to be printed, included it as one of the eight chapters in Country By-Ways.
     3 Miss Jewett's horse Sheila was her principal means of transportation on journeys of up to fifty miles. She drove as far as Exeter, New Hampshire, to visit her aunts, and to Amesbury, Massachusetts, to talk to Whittier.
     4 Sara Jewett (1847-1899)was the leading lady of Augustin Daly's Union Square Theatre company. Miss Jewett of South Berwick recounts drolly that upon several occasions during her travels she was mistaken for Miss Jewett of New York, then considered one of the most beautiful women in America. In an ironic extension of the parallel, illness and enforced retirement became the lot of both thespian and literary Jewett. Sara Jewett's last appearance as an actress took place in the spring of 1883.
    5 Alden's editorial judgment was not swayed by Miss Jewett's eloquence. Although they met soon after the date of this letter and became friends -- he was one of the group that saw her off on her first trip to Europe in the spring of 1882 -- he accepted no more of her sketches for nearly five years. He printed five of her poems, but no prose until "Farmer Finch" in January 1885.


20 SUSAN HAYES WARD
     Susan Hayes Ward (1838-1924), writer on religious topics, was an art critic and office editor of the Independent, of which her brother William Hayes Ward was editor. In earlier days the Wards visited frequently with a friend of Miss Jewett, their Aunt Mary Hayes, who lived in the house next to Berwick Academy. The Wards were alumni of the Academy, as was Miss Jewett.

     The Brunswick
     New York
     Friday [February 1881]

    Dear Susy Ward:

     I am here for a very few days and I went to your friend Mrs. Watson's this morning to see if you might chance to be in town, and I heard that you were planning to come in tomorrow. If it is to be in the morning and you are anywhere in this neighbourhood, I wish that you would be so kind as to come and see me -- me and also Mrs. Fields!1 I shall be here between 10 and 10:30 or eleven o'clock certainly.
     I have not time to get out to see you and dear Hetta2 and I hated to ask you to come in on purpose, but I make bold on the score of Mrs. Watson's knowing your plans.
     With love to you both.
     Yours ever affectionately,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915), wife of the publisher James T. Fields, earned her own fame as poet and biographer. After Fields's death in 1881, Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields became inseparable companions, visiting extensively at each other's homes, and traveling together in the United States, on four European tours, and a Caribbean cruise. Miss Jewett dedicated The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore "To A. F.," and Mrs. Fields edited the Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett.
     2 Hetta Lord Hayes Ward (1842-1921), sister of Susan and William, reported on architecture, exhibitions of painting, the applied and domestic arts for the Independent, as well as publishing delightful stories and verses for children.



21 WILLIAM PERRY
     Dr. William Perry, Miss Jewett's maternal grandfather from Exeter, New Hampshire (see Genealogical Chart), was universally acknowledged an original character. A farm boy, he struck out resolutely on his own and achieved his objective, a degree from the Harvard Medical School. At 80 he was still testing mettlesome horses by racing them pellmell along the beaches, and at 92 still performing surgery. A man of tart, intransigent tongue and liberal disposition, he abhorred indecision and constantly devised colorful admonitions to spur his relatives and patients to positive action. He saw talent in his granddaughter at an early date and urged her to give it "proper attention." Miss Jewett dedicated The Story of the Normans "To my dear grandfather, Doctor William Perry, of Exeter."

     Dublin
     June 12, [1882]

    Dear Grandpa:

     This is only a note to tell you how well we are getting on and what a good time I am having. It is worth crossing the sea if it were twice as wide, just to have had these ten days in Ireland, and Mrs. Fields and I have enjoyed every day and only wish we could stay longer.
     I was so much interested in seeing more of Dublin today than we had time for when we were here last week, and it certainly is a beautiful old city. The colleges and hospitals arc splendid buildings. I think a doctor would be very proud of them. We went to St. Patrick's Cathedral to see Dean Swift's monument and found so many others that we were interested in. It was my first sight of an old cathedral. In the time we have been ashore we have been at Cork, Glengariff, Killarney, Enniskillen, Portrush, and the Giants Causeway, and a night in Belfast beside two nights here. Tomorrow we go to London where I am hoping to have a very good time indeed. But I can't have the delight and strangeness of this week but once.
     I write long letters home and after I get settled down a little I hope to write to my other friends, but of course a good deal had to be crowded into this week, and I have been too tired to touch a pen at night. I am learning so much every day, and I am so glad I am here. It is late and I will send you more love than letter, and say good night, and promise to do better next time.
     Love to Uncle Will and Aunty and Fanny and much for yourself from
     Sarah
     Tell Elizabeth1 I liked Enniskillen very much. It is really a most beautiful place.2

NOTES

     1 Elizabeth Watkin was Dr. Perry's cook, one of a long succession of native Irish housemaids who served in the Perry and Jewett homes.
     2 On this first of four European tours, each taken in company with Mrs. Fields, Miss Jewett touched on England, Norway, Belgium, Italy, France, and Switzerland, besides Ireland. Of the people she met, she spoke most enthusiastically of Tennyson, Charles Reade, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and Charles Dickens' family, with whom she had dinner.
     For other trips see Letters 60, note 2; 94, note 4; 112, note 1.


22 FRANCIS JACKSON GARRISON
     Francis Jackson Garrison (1848-1916), son of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, served as "confidential clerk" to H. O. Houghton and, after his death in 1895, continued in the same capacity to George H. Mifflin. Garrison's main responsibility was the import-export business, but he also set rates to be paid authors and supervised manufacturing orders. He became secretary of the firm when it was incorporated in 1908.

     [December 1882]

    Dear Mr. Garrison:

     I enclose this note which has a message for H. M. & Co.1 I thought it was best to let the story be reprinted in the little paper.2 I have been asked for it before, and from other quarters, and they might be right in thinking that it will do some good in reaching that special audience.
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     Do not take the trouble to return the letter.

     NOTES
     1 Houghton, Mifflin & Company, which was organized in 1880, succeeded Houghton, Osgood & Company. All but three of Miss Jewett's books were published by this firm and its predecessors, reflecting, as it were, the motto on the Jewett coat of arms: Toujours Le Même.
    2 The story may be "Jack's Merry Christmas," which appeared in the Independent, XXXIII (December 15, 1881), 31-32; in which case "the little paper" is the Maine Sentinel (Biddeford), which reprinted the story in vol. XI (January 2, 1883), 45.



23 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     March 3, [1883]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I ought to have told you that Mr. Warner1 wished to have the manuscripts returned to 148 Charles St. instead of to Hartford, in case you do not wish to use them,2 but I forgot this when we were talking yesterday.
     Yours ever sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age, was editor of the Hartford Courant from 1861 to 1900, and contributing editor of Harper's from 1884 to 1898. Tireless in his encouragement of female writers, he visited Miss Jewett at South Berwick and she, in turn, stopped regularly at the Warner household in Hartford.
     2 Miss Jewett may be referring to some sketches or poems she sent to Warner, with the request that he relay them to Scudder if they were not suitable. Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly published Miss Jewett a total of six times this year.



24 JESSIE McDERMOTT [WALCOTT]
     Jessie McDermott (b. 1857)began to appear as an illustrator of juvenile stories and poems in magazines around 1878 as JMcD. In 1891she married Charles Hosmer Walcott, Concord lawyer and historian of the town. After his death in 1901 she appended her marriage name to her professional signature. She most often embellished the children's tales and jingles of Margaret Johnson in St. Nicholas, and not infrequently provided drawings for her own verses.

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 23, 1883
 

     Dear Miss McDermott:

     I have looked at the picture which you drew for my little story in the June Wide Awake1with so much pleasure that I wish to thank you. I think it is charmingly done, and the doleful little girl in the chair is so like the Katy whom I 'made up,' that it seems quite wonderful.
     Yours is really a most careful and satisfactory piece of work, but I wish I could say the same of my sketch which somehow missed being read in the proof, and which ought to have been revised by its guilty writer. However! -- and I will do my part better next time.2
     Yours sincerely and with many thanks.
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "Katy's Birthday," Wide Awake, XVII (June 1883), 36-40; collected in Katy's Birthday by Sarah O. Jewett with Other Stories by Famous Authors (Boston, 1883).
     2 Miss Jewett may have felt sheepish over the fact that on page 40 the word in was printed instead of and.


25 LAURA E. BELLAMY
     Laura E. Bellamy (1847-1897),of Kittery Point, Maine, wrote sheaves of poems and published a dozen or so in local newspapers. She was the sister of John Haley Bellamy, one of America's foremost carvers of ships' figureheads, sought out by such diverse men as Charles Eliot Norton, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Winslow Homer, and Edwin Booth.


     South Berwick, Maine
     August 31, 1885

    My dear Miss Bellamy:

     I am sorry that I have not been able to answer your letter sooner, but I was glad I had not written you when I found this little essay yesterday in the Sunday Herald.1 It says many things, which you will appreciate, much better than I could say them, and, I think, gives us a simple straightforward explanation of the fact that some books are for a time and some for no time and some for all time. It isn't for me to decide whether you must keep on writing; that belongs to your own heart and conscience. But I know one thing -- that you will not be left in the dark about it. Do not be misled either by a difficulty or a facility of expression. If you have something to say, it will and must say itself, and the people will listen to whom the message is sent.
     I often think that the literary work which takes the least prominent place nowadays is that belonging to the middle ground. Scholars and so-called intellectual persons have the wealth of literature in the splendid accumulation of books that belong to all times, and now and then a new volume is added to the great list. Then there is the lowest level of literature, the trashy newspapers and sensational novels, but how seldom a book comes that stirs the minds and hearts of the good men and women of such a village as this, for instance. One might say that they are not readers by nature or that they do not get their learning in this way, but the truth must be recognized that few books are written for and from their standpoint. That they have read certain books proves that they would read others if they had them. And whoever adds to this department of literature will do an inestimable good, will see that a simple, helpful way of looking at life and speaking the truth about it -- "To see life steadily, and see it whole," as Matthew Arnold says -- in what we are pleased to call its everyday aspects must bring out the best sort of writing. My dear father used to say to me very often, "Tell things just as they are!"2 and used to show me what he meant in A Sentimental Journey! The great messages and discoveries of literature come to us, they write us, and we do not control them in a certain sense. From what I know of your wishes in regard to your work, I am sure you will not neglect any chance of forwarding it, and if it proves that you must make something else first, and put the great gift and pleasure of writing second in your life, you will live none the less helpfully and heartily, and try to find God's meaning and purpose for your work and give it to the world again in whatever you do.
     I try to remember very often a bit from a criticism upon one of Miss Thackeray's novels which I saw in Harper's long ago: "It is, after all, Miss Thackeray herself in Old Kensington who gives the book its charm."3
     I fear that I cannot help you much, but I hope and believe that you are equal to helping yourself, for it is what we ourselves put into our own lives that really counts. Thank you for letting me see Mr. Ward's4 letter which pleased me very much. I only wish that I could be as kind a friend to younger writers as those friends whom I found when I was beginning. But they all said, "Work away!"5
     With best wishes, believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "Tests in Literature," Boston Sunday Herald (August 30, 1885), 12; an unsigned discussion of the successful versus the unsuccessful book, using for illustration the works of Shakespeare, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Keats, Dana, Ticknor, Browning, Tennyson, and Whitman.
     2 This maxim Miss Jewett quoted on several occasions and in usually variant form. Her published version in "Looking Back on Girlhood," Youth's Companion, LXV (January 7, 1892), 6, is probably closest to his exact words. See also Letters 2, note 3; 68, note 2; 99.
     3 Review of Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Old Kensington in the "Editor's Literary Record," Harper's, XLVII (June 1873), 131. Henry Mills Alden, then editor, actually wrote: "It is Miss Thackeray in Old Kensington which makes it so delightful a story."
     4 William Hayes Ward (see headnote, Letter 62).
     5 For other letters to aspiring writers see Fields, Letters, 245-250 (to Willa Cather), and letters to Andress S. Floyd and John Thaxter in this volume.


26 FRANCIS JACKSON GARRISON

     South Berwick, Maine
     November 20, [1885]

    Dear Mr. Garrison:

     I have been wishing to thank you for your kind and delightful letter, which brought me real pleasure and a sense of friendly companionship, and for the book, a beautiful memorial to your father.1 The Words are "still vital with spiritual insight" and all the heavenly gifts your preface claims. I had sent it -- or ordered it to be sent -- to David Douglas2 for he always seems to me akin to these things, and to another old friend who lives near Manchester and who will soon have this book by heart, though he followed the maker of it through all the old days. Somehow it gave me a great delight in imagination to follow the two volumes on their way.
     Your letter sounds as if the summer's journey had done you good. It is good to have new things to think of, and such freshening makes one see the old things with new eyes. I hope that it will be long before you get so very tired again; it was too bad!
     When I get to town by and by I shall hope to see you and dear Mrs. Garrison. Tell her that I get very hungry and thirsty sometimes for some music.
     Yours most sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 With his brother Wendell Phillips Garrison, Francis Jackson wrote William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; The Story of his Life as told by his Children (New York, 1885-1889), 4 vols. Francis also edited The Words of Garrison (Boston, 1905).
     2 David Douglas (1823-1916), of Edinburgh, editor of the Journal of Sir Walter Scott (New York, 1890), and the Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Boston, 1894). Miss Jewett enjoyed the wholesome domesticity of Douglas' household and made a point of visiting him on her trips abroad.


27 GERTRUDE V. WICKHAM
     Gertrude VanR. Wickham was commissioned by St. Nicholas, a children's magazine, to write a series of three articles on "Dogs of Noted Americans," which appeared in the issues of June, July 1888 and May 1889. The account of Miss Jewett's dog, closely paraphrasing this letter, was published in the last (XVI, 544-545).

     Richfield, New York
     August 29, 1886
     My Dear Mrs. Wickham:

     Indeed I have a dog1 and a very dear one of much and varied information and great dignity of character. His name is Roger and he is a large Irish setter with a splendid set of fringes to his paws and tail, and two eyes that ask more questions and make more requests than dogs I know. And it is nearly impossible to refuse his requests that he is quite in danger of being spoiled or would be if he were not so sensible. Once the Reverend J. G. Wood,2 who understands dog life as well as anybody in the world, asked us reproachfully while Roger lay before the library fire on a very soft rug, if he ever had to do anything he didn't like. And I felt for a long time afterward that I might be neglecting the dear dog's moral education.
     Roger spends his winters in Boston, where luckily he has a good-sized garden to run about in on the shore of the Charles River, but he likes to be taken out for a long walk and follows me so carefully and politely that I feel very much honoured and obliged. It is such a delight and such a touching thing to see what pleasure he gives the people in the shops, and I quite forget my errands sometimes in talking about him. Roger himself cannot help feeling how tired faces light up when he comes by on his four paws with wagging tail, and I am sure that he is very grateful to the tired hands that pat him -- and knows that he rouses a too uncommon feeling of common humanity and sympathy.
     But any mention of Roger without a word of his best friend, Patrick Lynch,3 would be incomplete. All his best loyalty and affection show themselves at the sound of Patrick's step -- for this means all outdoors, and the market, and long scurries about town and splashes in the frog-pond, and, more than that, it means one person that understands what Roger wants and why he wants it. Whether Patrick has learned dog-language or Roger knows how to whine English I really cannot tell, but it must be one or the other. All day Roger is expecting some sort of surprise and pleasure with this most congenial of his friends, but every evening he condescends to spend quietly with the rest of the family and comes tick-toeing along the hall floor and upstairs to the library, as if he were well aware that he conferred a real benefaction. Alas, there are sometimes bonnets outward bound which give him a great sorrow if he finds that, as often happens, he must stay at home. But if he is invited to go, what leaping and whining in noisy keys! What rushing along snowy streets! What treeing of unlucky pussies and scattering of wayfarers on account of his size and apparent fierceness!
     But the best place to see this dog is in the summer by the sea, where he runs about in the sunshine, shining like copper, and always begging somebody for a walk or barking at the top of a ledge for the sake of being occupied in some way! Mrs. Fields is more than ever his best mistress there, for she oftenest invites him to walk along the beach and chase sand peeps. Strange to say, this amusement never fails though the sand peeps always fly to seaward and disappoint their eager hunter.
     I hope that I have not said too much. I think your plan a charming one, and wish you great success.
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Miss Jewett was seldom without at least one house pet. See "Sara Orne Jewett's Dog," St. Nicholas, XVI (May 1889), 544-545; "Some Literary Cats," St. Nicholas, XXVII (August 1900), 923-926; Fields, Letters, 46, 62, 66, 75, 101, 147; and Letters 130, 131 in this volume.
     2 John George Wood (1827-1889) wrote some thirty books on botany, zoology, natural history, and Biblical animals, in which he studied minutely common objects of the country and seashore. In Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter (1874)Reverend Wood combined his vocation and avocation.
     3 In the employ of Mrs. Fields.


28 "DEAR MADAM"
     One of the anonymous horde of autograph-seekers that Miss Jewett accommodated, usually without comment, here with a touch of modesty tinged with irony.


     July 1, 1887

    Dear Madam:

     I am sorry that I have no indelible ink at hand, and I am afraid that you can make no use of this autograph written in ordinary ink.
     However, I send it.
     Yrs very truly,
     S. O. Jewett



29 F. HOPKINSON SMITH
     Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915), artist, engineer, and architect, turned to literature when he was nearly fifty. Like Miss Jewett, he concentrated on regional characteristics, often supplying the illustrations for his attractive volumes.

     South Berwick, Maine
     September 24, 1887

    My dear Mr. Smith:

     I must send a word to tell you that I was perfectly delighted to find that you have really published the new edition of Well-Worn Roads. I sent for a copy at once and here it is; a truly charming little book for which I wish all the good fortune it deserves.1
     With best regards to Mrs. Smith, I am
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1Well-Worn Roads of Spain, Holland, and Italy (Boston, 1887), adequately described by its subtitle "Traveled by a painter in search of the picturesque," achieved sufficient popularity to be reprinted in 1898.


30 MARIA H. BRAY
     Unidentified.

     March 1, 1888

    Dear Mrs. Bray:

     The scene of A Marsh Island is somewhere within the borders of the town of Essex but even I have never succeeded in finding the exact place! Choate Island suggested the island itself, but I never went there until a year ago -- long after the story was finished. It was seeing it in the distance or perhaps earlier still noticing an 'island farm' near Rowley from a car window on the Eastern railroad, that gave me my first hint of the book.1
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 The area of Massachusetts which Miss Jewett here invokes is the coastal stretch between Newburyport and Manchester in the county of Essex, a region of creeks, channels, and salt marshes much traveled and thoroughly familiar to her; the trains of the Boston & Maine Railroad (Eastern Division) ran along this route. The marsh island in her novel is situated in "Sussex" County, not far from the town of "Sussex," similarly marked by tidewater inlets and unreclaimed marshland.
     This is another example of Miss Jewett's reluctance to be pinned down to a specific source of her scenes (see Letters 8, note 4; 96, note 3).



31 WALTER R. BENJAMIN
     Walter Romeyn Benjamin (1854-1943), historian and antiquarian, was coeditor until his death of The Collector, "A Magazine for Autograph and Historical Collectors."

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 15, 1888
 

     Mr. Benjamin will please find enclosed a cheque for the letters of Sainte-Beuve and Mme. George Sand, advertised in the May no. of The Collector.1
    S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1Miss Jewett had a marked predilection for volumes of collected letters. Her library included those of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Madame de Sévigné, Voltaire, Dickens, FitzGerald, Lady L. Duff-Gordon, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, William Cowper, Edward Lear, Lady Louisa Stuart, William Thackeray, and three volumes of British Letters edited by Edward T. Mason. In addition, she mentions reading those of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Scott, Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter, Julie de Lespinasse, Saint Teresa, Queen Victoria, and others.



32 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
     Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (1835-1921), born in Calais, Maine, was a prolific contributor of poems, stories, and articles to popular magazines. She was at her best in presenting picturesque New England locales, but she also ventured into literary criticism; her appreciative review of Miss Jewett's work appeared in The Book Buyer for August 1894. She spent many winters in Boston, became a member of the literary circle there, and was customarily called "Hally." In her memoir of ten female contemporaries, A Little Book of Friends (Boston, 1916), the first two chapters are devoted respectively to Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett.

     148 Charles Street1
     Boston
     February 17, [1889]

    Dear Mrs. Spofford:

     This morning I had an unexpected delight in a first reading of two new poems of yours! I was soberly reading some St. Nicholas proofs when I saw at the bottom of one of the slips the impression of uninked type, and I began to puzzle it out and found your most beautiful "The King's Dust" and "A Worm,"2 and by getting a very good light I managed to read them to Mrs. Fields. I cannot tell you how exquisite we both thought them or how we enjoyed finding them in such curious fashion. I had to send them back but we shall be looking for them again in print presently. I suppose this slip lay under another on which your proof was printed. I wish I could tell you what A. F. said while she was praising them, but indeed she thought them most exquisite and full of truth. They were somehow a true joy this rainy day, your great little poems, and I could not help sending a line to say so.
     Yours most sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Annie Fields's Boston home, overlooking the Charles River. Miss Jewett considered this her second home and for almost three decades made a long annual visit during the winter. The two friends spent their time together reading, writing, entertaining, taking in concerts, exhibits, and the theatre, and engaging in philanthropic enterprises. Mrs. Fields's Saturday Afternoon, in the long Victorian drawing room crowded with books, pictures, and framed autographs of famous authors, attracted the best-known artists, writers, and wits of the day. Lowell, Holmes, Aldrich, Whittier, and Whipple were among those in frequent attendance. Foreign authors on an American tour usually dropped in for readings and conversation. For a full account see Mrs. Spofford's A LittleBook of Friends, 3-17.
    2 "The King's Dust" was published in St. Nicholas, XVI (June 1889), 585,the same issue which contains the third and final installment of Miss Jewett's "A Bit of Color," later titled Betty Leicester in book form. "A Worm" was not printed until July 1890 and then under the caption "Wings."


33 F. HOPKINSON SMITH

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     February 24, 1889

    Dear Mr. Smith:

     The little book is here and I thank you for so delightful and unexpected a gift! and for the kindness of some words written on the flyleaf. When I go down to Berwick to see the large paper illustrated edition, it will look surprisingly small to my eyes fresh from a sight of this. Mrs. Fields's copy of the same edition is quite an everyday sort of book, and my own stories are strangers and foreigners compared to this particular copy of Well-Worn Roads. Well-Worn Leaves are these to be where you have put your story-pictures and they will lop open always to the story of the nun and the hint of rose-madder.
     The river is frozen over today and the gulls, all breakfastless, are flying about to keep themselves warm, and flapping their wings like coachmen there is such icy air a-blowing.
     I must thank you again for the pleasure you gave us the other evening. I hope that you can manage to come on again for the Authors' Reading.1
     Yours ever sincerely (with best regards to Mrs. Smith),
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 In his James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1900), 11, 333-334, Scudder declared drily that by the winter of 1886 "the rage for Author Readings had set in, and under the guise of charity of one sort or another, society compelled its favorites to stand and deliver their old poems." During this period, however, the Readings were held for the benefit of the Copyright League, which was busily campaigning for international recognition of authors' rights.
     Miss Jewett seldom participated in large public functions of this sort. A notable exception occurred during the winter of 1887 when she consented to act as secretary to the committee which arranged an impressive Authors' Reading in the Boston Museum for the purpose of raising a Longfellow Memorial fund (see Lilian W. Aldrich, Crowding Memories [Boston, 1920], 255-262, and Colby Library Quarterly, VII [March 1965], 36, 40-42).


34 F. HOPKINSON SMITH

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     April 20, 1889
     Dear Mr. Smith:

     The day your new book came into my hands, I was going down to the country and I did not have your address with me. Then I came back to town and said a great deal about the White Umbrella1 to my friends, but quite forgotten that thinking about a letter of thanks doesn't put it into the postbox and send it. Forgive me for such ungrateful carelessness for indeed I enjoy your stories more and more and I am one of the first to thank you for what you write. Nothing could be more charming than the dress of these Mexican sketches - you make the little book as pretty as a picture!
     With best regards to Mrs. Smith from Mrs. Fields and myself, I beg you to believe me always
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1A White Umbrella in Mexico (Boston, 1889), one of Smith's typical sets of exotic travel sketches with illustrations by the author.


35 J. APPLETON BROWN
     John Appleton Brown (1844-1902), a painter of serene flower gardens, cheerful landscapes, and marine scenes. He was one of the coterie of artists who spent a good part of each year at Appledore Island, Celia Thaxter's home. A delicate engraving of a river scene, dated June 29, 1886, and inscribed by Brown to Miss Jewett, hangs in her bedroom at the Memorial House in South Berwick.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     May 6, [1889]

     Dear Mr. Brown:

     I was so delighted with the picture of you and Roger when it came that I hate to be so late in thanking you for it. I stood it against the wall and had it for company, with many pleasant remembrances of the doggie and his master.
     I have had a very hard pull of illness and today I went out for the first time for a little drive and felt as if I had gone through with the battle of Waterloo and had not beaten either! In a day or two I am going to Berwick and there I shall pick up faster, where one can get out of doors without preliminary arrangements! Mrs. Fields is going down with me, but when she comes back she hopes to see you and Mrs. Brown.1 The garden is lovely now, and a new double-flowering cherry tree is in bloom for the first time.2
     Will you please tell Mr. and Mrs. Shapleigh3 how sorry we were to miss seeing them and how glad we were to see the picture?
     With love to Mrs. Brown, believe me ever
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 See headnote, Letter 57.
     2 Miss Jewett took especial joy in the extensive garden back of her house. She employed one full-time and one part-time gardener to maintain it in becoming condition. All townspeople who remember her affirm that she passed most of her leisure hours in this beautifully cultivated sanctuary.
     3 Mary A. Shapleigh, and Frank Henry Shapleigh (1842-1906), a painter best known for his New England landscapes. He kept a studio in Boston and one at the Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine, Florida, where Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields stayed several times.



36 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY
     Andrew Preston Peabody (1811-1893) was pastor of the South Parish Unitarian Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for twenty-seven years, then professor of Christian Morals and twice acting president of Harvard. Editor and proprietor of the North American Review from 1853 to 1863, he contributed some 1600 pages of writing to it, besides publishing about 190 books and pamphlets on subjects ranging from travel and taxation to ethics, and translations of classic literature.

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 6, 1889

     Dear Doctor Peabody:

     I should be most ungrateful if I did not say at once how heartily I thank you for your kindest of letters. I had already a thousand good reasons for thanking you, but the things you say about my little story book1 will be a continual pleasure and inspiration. I hoped that you might find some familiar glimpses of the old river towns that we both know and love, but I am sure that the reader brought more to the book than the writer; the one having so much more to bring than the other! and being a master of translation beside!
     Believe me, with my best thanks
     Ever most gratefully yours,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 In a four-page letter (Colby College Library) dated December 4, 1889, Dr. Peabody tells Miss Jewett expansively that "a man of nearly fourscore has been instructed and impressed" by her Betty Leicester (1890), a story for young girls. In keeping with the custom of that era, books published with an eye to the Christmas trade were predated to the year ahead in order to impart a sense of brand-newness.


37 CHARLES E. L. WINGATE
     Charles Edgar Lewis Wingate (1861-1944) was originally dramatic editor, later managing editor and general manager of the Boston Journal. He also served as special Boston correspondent for the Critic, a weekly magazine of the arts and literature.

     Hotel Ponce de Leon
     St. Augustine, Florida
     February 3, 1890

    Dear Mr. Wingate:

     I am afraid that the necessary delay in my receiving your note of the 28th January will make the enclosed opinion of no use to you but I take pleasure in sending it. I should be glad to send fresh readers to Mr. Lowell's fine essay,1 at any rate, and I think in this case he has the final word.
     I hope that what I have written will serve your purpose. If I have written too much, I think you had better begin with the second paragraph, but I hope that you can find space for the whole question. I should like very much to see the result of your work when it comes in print. Mrs. Fields and I are not having the paper sent regularly.2
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 A check of morning and evening editions of the Boston Journal and of the Critic for this period reveals no word about Lowell by Miss Jewett, so her communication did probably arrive too late to be utilized. Reference may be to Lowell's address to the Modern Language Association, published in PMLA, V (January 1890), 5-22, and collected in his Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (Boston, 1892), 131-159, as "The Study of Modern Languages." Here Lowell applauds the growth of modern language teaching and refutes the attitude that masterpieces could only be written in the classical languages.
     2 An item from the Critic, n.s. XIII (February 22, 1890), 96, conveys the flavor of the Jewett-Fields relationship: "Mrs. James T. Fields and Miss Sarah O. Jewett are, I was about to say, summering at Saint Augustine, Fla., not simply because the weather there suggests the butterfly season, but because wherever these close literary friends are they diffuse a genial social warmth. Miss Jewett, whose home is in South Berwick, Me., amid the scenes which she has invested with such picturesque interest, is in the habit of visiting Mrs. Fields during the winter in Boston, and they enjoy taking trips together wherever their fancy leads them."


38 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     March 15, 1890

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I will send you an answer to your note of this morning so that you shall have it early on Monday. I have not managed yet to get time to look through the stories.
     I wished to ask you at once if it would not be better to push this book through and let it come out before summer, since it simply makes one of a series, and if I should make up another volume of short stories in the autumn they might get into each other's way and 'trip up!' You see, I betray a sad lack of confidence in my children! You do not express any disapproval of the title which I put on the cover: Tales of New England.1 It says itself well and easily and perhaps will do as well as another, though I was not sure of that first. You do not think it is too ambitious? But what are they Tales of, if not ----? --------! says
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 This book was published under that title by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in May 1890 as one of the Riverside Aldine Series. It contained eight stories culled from four of her previous collections. Despite her qualms, it was reprinted four times in the next six years. The other volume she refers to is Strangers and Wayfarers, eleven stories gathered from the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, Harper's, and Century, published in November 1890.This too achieved multiple editions in a short time.


39 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     June 20, [1890]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     Your news1 takes my breath away, and I confess to something like the feeling I once knew when I had written "The Shipwrecked Buttons" and, for the pride of my heart, was kindly asked for another story which proved to be "The Girl With the Cannon Dresses."2 Indeed, I send my warmest good wishes to the Atlantic and its editor. I hope that you will find double the pleasure and satisfaction you arc looking for in these new duties which are after all neither new nor untried.
     I thank you very much for your kind and cordial note and I will certainly try to have a story ready, though I am ashamed to say that I have hardly got back yet to industrious habits. Will you let me know how much time I can have, please? And pray believe me always
     Yours faithfully and sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Scudder succeeded Thomas Bailey Aldrich as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in April 1890.
    2 Twenty years before, Scudder had published these stories in the Riverside Magazine (see Letters 1, note 1; 6, note 1).


40 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     July 3, 1890

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I wish that you would be kind enough to look over this sketch and see if you think it is worth printing. I wrote it some months ago and then put it by. But Mr. Aldrich1 insists that I don't know the best work I can do when I see it, and never has ceased to speak of my undervaluing "The Dulham Ladies!"2
     I should not send this, however, 'on the chance' unless I were very doubtful about finishing another sketch which I began for you. My mother has been very ill in these last two weeks and now that she is getting better I don't feel quite in condition for my work and I am half afraid that, if I went on with the new sketch, it wouldn't be so good as this one that I send. So I boldly risk being a rejected contributor at the start!!3
     Yours ever sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) was editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. The Aldriches lived on Beacon Hill during his active editing days and became quite friendly with Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields. Miss Jewett visited them at their summer home in Ponkapog, Massachusetts, and exchanged playful letters with both Aldrich and his wife Lilian. In 1895 the Aldriches rented a little cottage, The Crags, at Tenants Harbor, Maine, and enjoyed the company of Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields, who were vacationing at Martinsville. In 1896 all four took a cruise of the Caribbean islands (see Letter 78, note 3).
    2 In the Atlantic Monthly, LVII (April 1886), 455-462; collected in A White Heron. Although Aldrich's comparative values are questionable -- he said in a letter to Miss Jewett, "I believe, for example, that Hawthorne's pallid allegories will have faded away long before those two little Dulham ladies" -- his verdict on public opinion has been sustained by time. Over the years, "The Dulham Ladies" has been the most consistently anthologized of Miss Jewett's stories.
     3 Since Miss Jewett had already appeared over thirty times in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, she was of course alluding to Scudder's "start" as full-fledged editor. Scudder did reject this unidentified sketch (see Letter 41).


41 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     July 24, 1890

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I send you this sketch, "By the Morning Boat,"1 which I am pretty sure you will like better than the other which is good (and tame!) enough but never belonged to the Atlantic. I should not have sent it to you under other circumstances, or if I had not wished so much to be in your first number. The House has paid me fifteen dollars a page or thereabouts, on acceptance, in these later years of a long and industrious career, but I continue to make believe that I am still beginning in the Riverside! You and MissFrancis2 must be kind as you begin to discover signs of decadence, but I perceive that I take too mournful a strain for a business letter!
     Yours ever sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Atlantic Monthly, LXVI (October 1890), 518 -- 525; collected in Strangers and Wayfarers.
    2 Susan Moore Francis (1839-1919), graceful essayist and book reviewer, came to the Atlantic as editorial assistant during the incumbency of James T. Fields and served the five succeeding editors in similar capacity. Reputed to have an uncanny flair for judging manuscripts, she is credited with suggesting to Fields that he invite Bret Harte to contribute to the Atlantic, but she is also said to have turned down David Harum because it was "vulgar."


   42 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     Manchester, Mass.1
     August 1, [1890]

     Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I had given up the idea of making up a new book of stories this autumn because I thought that Tales of New England would in a measure take the place of it. But if you think that it would be a good plan, and a better piece of business than to wait until the spring, I shall be glad to abide by your judgment. There are more than enough stories for a volume and I could put them together with very little trouble.2 I shall be leaving here Monday morning and I can go into town and see about it at any hour between a little after ten o'clock and three.
     I thank you for your kind note and I am very glad that you liked the sketch.3
     My sister enjoyed seeing you and Mrs. Scudder very much indeed. I think that it must be pleasanter than ever this summer at Little Boar's Head,4 for she has so many pleasant tales to tell!
     Believe me
     Yours faithfully,
     S. O. Jewett
     I shall be at South Berwick after leaving here and I will remember to keep you advised on account of the proofs.

     NOTES
     1 This popular resort which came to be known as Manchester-by-the-Sea was the site of Mrs. Fields's summer home, Gambrel Cottage, on Thunderbolt Hill. Miss Jewett began visiting her friend here in September 1880, when Mr. Fields was still alive. He admired her instantaneously and spoke of her as an ideal companion for his wife, which she became after his death in the following year. Here, as at 148 Charles Street, gathered the elite of literature and the arts, and the time was passed in comfort, conversation, and projects.
     2 Scudder advised Miss Jewett to get the volume together posthaste. Strangers and Wayfarers, a collection of eleven short stories from the Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, Harper's, and Century, appeared in November 1890.
    3 "By the Morning Boat."
     4 A showplace of southeastern New Hampshire about half a mile from Rye, where Miss Jewett's maternal aunts had a summer home. The Scudders rented houses at Little Boar's Head for several years, and Mrs. Ingersoll Bowditch (Scudder's daughter Sylvia) recalls Mary Jewett visiting there.


43 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     South Berwick, Maine
     August 8, [1890]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     Will you please send me the first sketch which I sent you?1 I meant to have taken it the other day and so to have saved you this trouble. I was sorry not to find you, but I did not know what days you were in town, and I had not given time enough for an answer to my letter.
     In making up the new book of stories (which I mean to call Strangers and Wayfarers) I meant to put in my new sketch, "By the Morning Boat," for the last or next to the last, so, when the Atlantic proof is ready, will you be so kind as to ask the printers to send me duplicates in order that I may have one to keep?
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     I am sending this note to Little Boar's Head because I think it is possible that the sketch may be there. Please give my very kindest remembrances to Mrs. Scudder.

     NOTE
     1 See Letter 40, note 3.


44 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     August 19, 1890

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I notice that in the proof of my sketch the title is changed to "By the Morning's Boat." Do you think best to let it stand so and was it your change? I liked the common phrase the Morning Boat as one hears it down the Coast, like 'morning sky' and 'shining morning face!' Unless you have a preference in the matter I should like to let the first reading stand. But I leave the final decision to you -- being my editor!1
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     Do not give yourself the trouble to answer this note.
     [On 4th page]
     25th August

    Dear Mr. Scudder, this note turns up among the papers on my (disorderly!) desk. Is it too late? I am very sorry that I forgot to post it.
      NOTES
     1 Scudder acceded to Miss Jewett's preference. The title was rendered without the offending apostrophe s in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly and was so reproduced in Strangers and Wayfarers.


45 WILLIAM H. RIDEING
     William Henry Rideing (1853-1918), an English-born journalist, came to the United States when he was sixteen. Frequent contributor to periodicals and author of fifteen books of travel, biography, and fiction, he served as associate editor of Youth's Companion from 1881 to 1918 and of the North American Review from 1888 to 1899.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     October 24, [1890]

    Dear Mr. Rideing:

     I thank you for your very kind note and I must say that your plan for a series of autobiographical sketches interests me very much. I should like to make certain points in mine about the value that simple country surroundings have had in my life simply because I was taught to be interested in things close at hand. So many young people imagine that it is their surroundings that help or hinder them.
     I make it a rule not to do work of this sort for less than a hundred dollars unless in exceptional cases. I do not mean work of this character -- but when I am asked by a magazine to do a special thing, I know very well that a magazine must have some regard to the length of a paper! But I find, on the author's part, that fifteen hundred words usually give me more work than four thousand, and when I break into other work I must consider that. But it is foreign to my wish to drive a hard bargain, and I promise to send you the sketch.1
     Believe me with best regards
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     Please to address me at South Berwick, Maine.

     NOTE
     1 "Looking Back on Girlhood," Youth's Companion, LXV (January 7, 1892), 5-6, was the first in a series of six reminiscent essays by prominent authors of the day. In the opening paragraph, Miss Jewett paraphrases her oft-repeated theme of this letter: "In giving this brief account of my childhood, or, to speak exactly, of the surroundings which have affected the course of my work as a writer, my first thought flies back to those who taught me to observe, and to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interested in the lives of people about me."


46 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 18, [1890]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I wish very much that you could print in the Atlantic a paper that I heard Mrs. Whitman1 read on "Colour" the other evening. It is very full of suggestions. I think that no one could fail to be wiser and to find his power of enjoyment vastly increased. No one who read it or heard it would go away ungrateful. Of course it would need working over in certain places to change it into magazine shape. I am sure that you would make allowance for this in the first looking over. I write without having said anything to Mrs. Whitman, but I hope that you will ask her to let you see the paper and that she will not say no!2 I tried to find you at your office a few days ago wishing to speak of this, but you had gone out of town.
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Sarah Wyman Whitman (see headnote, Letter 131).
     2 Either Mrs. Whitman or Mr. Scudder said "no." No paper of this description made its appearance in the Atlantic Monthly.


47 ALICE GREENWOOD HOWE
     Mrs. George D. Howe (1835-1924), a friend of long standing both at Boston and Manchester. Miss Jewett dedicated The Country of the Pointed Firs "To Alice Greenwood Howe."

     South Berwick, Maine
     January 9, 1891

    My dear Alice:

     You were very good to remember me in sending such a pleasant invitation, but I am afraid I shall not be in town for a long time yet as my mother has been very ill again and I am staying at home almost constantly this winter.
     Everybody is most delighted at the news of the Fogg Library.1 You may be sure that nobody is more pleased than I am.
     With my best thanks for the invitation, believe me ever
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 A tablet in the Fogg Memorial Library, a wing of Berwick Academy, states: "This building was erected AD 1894 in memory of William Hayes Fogg. Born in Berwick, Maine, Dec. 27, 1817. Died in New York City, March 29, 1884." Although Miss Jewett refers to him as "a former pupil" in "The Old Town of Berwick," New England Magazine, n.s.x (July 1894), 604, he is not listed as such in A Memorial of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of Berwick Academy (July 1, 1891). Fogg left Berwick as a young man and accumulated a fortune in the China and Japan trade. A large legacy left to the school by his widow was announced at this time. Miss Jewett concerned herself with the planning and construction of the building, and Sarah Wyman Whitman designed the stained glass windows and directed the interior decoration.


48 FREDERIC ALLISON TUPPER
     Frederic Allison Tupper (1858-1942) wrote poetry, a novel entitled Moonshine about the Reconstruction era, and books on teaching and education administration. He was principal of Arms Academy in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

     South Berwick, Maine
     January 20, 1891

    My dear Sir:

     I am sorry to be so late in thanking you for your kindness in sending me your book, Echoes from Dream-Land.1It was unfortunately mislaid for some time and has only appeared on my desk again today. I am sure that the writing of these pages must have given you much pleasure and I wish to thank you for the pleasure which the verses called "The Poet's Boyhood"2 have given me. I believe that I care more for them than any of the others which I had time to read yet.
     With best acknowledgments of your kind attention, believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 A volume of some eighty-five poems, among them several class odes and baccalaureate hymns, but predominantly nature lyrics in simple Wordsworthian strain; published in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, in 1890.
     2 A seventeen-quatrain reminiscence of his immersion in nature and emergence as a poet of its moods, unfolded in a series of familiar bucolic images and one Aeschylean epithet.


49 DANA ESTES
     Dana Estes (1840-1909), of Gorham, Maine, published books and ran a retail bookstore in partnership with Charles E. Lauriat on Washington Street, opposite the Old South Meeting House in Boston. In 1898 Estes formed his own firm, D. Estes & Company. As secretary of the Boston chapter of the American Publishers' Copyright League he became an important advocate in the movement for international copyright.

     South Berwick, Maine
     January 22, 1891

    My dear Mr. Estes:

     Will you give my best thanks to your committee and say that I regret very much that I cannot accept their polite invitation to the Dinner of the Pine Tree State Club1 on the twenty-eighth of January. Nobody at the feast will be more proud and fond of his native state than I am of what Whittier has called our "hundred-harbored Maine."2
     Believe me ever
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah Orne Jewett

     NOTES
     1 An organization of native Maine men living in and around Boston which convened periodically for intellectual and social fellowship.
     2 Miss Jewett's long friendship with Whittier came about through his association with publisher James T. Fields. Whittier looked forward to his meetings with Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields in Boston, Amesbury, and South Berwick, and maintained correspondence with them even when they went abroad. His letter to Miss Jewett on Deephaven vies in ardor with Emerson's to Whitman on Leaves of Grass. In 1888 Miss Jewett dedicated The King of Folly Island "with grateful affection" to the gentle Friend.
     Whittier wrote the sonnet "Godspeed" for "my friends Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett" on the occasion of their first departure for Europe in 1882. Not to be outdone, Miss Jewett eulogized him in "The Eagle Trees," Harper's, LXVI (March 1883), 608
     The allusion to Maine is from Whittier's "The Dead Ship of Harpswell":

     From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,
     From peril and from pain,
     The home-bound fisher greets thy lights,
     O hundred-harbored Maine!



50 DANA ESTES
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     January 22, [1891]

    Dear Mr. Estes:

     After writing my note of this morning I have remembered that Mrs. Richards of Gardiner1 is probably in town at 241 Beacon Street, and that you will undoubtedly like to have her asked to your dinner. I am very sorry that I was compelled to decline, but I am kept here this winter by the serious illness of a member of our farmly,2 and it is impossible for me to count upon going to town even for a day. If all the Maine-born people are as proud of Mrs. Richards -- the child of Maine's adoption -- as I am, then they are very proud indeed! I hope that I am right in thinking that she is available for your dinner company on the 28th, but you are likely to know, since she is of your publishing household.3
     Believe me, with best regards,
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Laura Elizabeth Richards (1850-1943), daughter of Julia Ward Howe, was a prolific poet, biographer, and novelist, best remembered for her two series of juvenile stories, the Toto and the Hildegarde books. Mrs. Richards came to Gardiner, Maine, in 1876 with her husband and resided there until her death.
     2 During this period Miss Jewett makes repeated reference to the fatal illness of her mother, Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, who died on October 21, 1891.
    3 Estes had already published eight of Mrs. Richards' books, one of which was her most durable novel, Captain January. No less than forty-four others appeared under the imprints of Estes & Lauriat and D. Estes & Company in the next twenty-two years.



51 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     February 28, [1891]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I think that you are right about using the name of a state. I can change Iowa to Wi-owa or Kan-sota and I will not forget it when I see the proofs.1
     Yours truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 The Honorable Joseph K. Laneway is presented as a Senator from the state of Kansota in "A Native of Winby," Atlantic Monthly, LXVII (May 1891), 609-620; collected in A Native of Winby and Other Tales.


52 ANDREW PRESTON PEABODY
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 11, 1891

    My dear Doctor Peabody:

     My sister is just sending you an invitation to our Great Day,1 and we hope that you can find it possible to say yes. So many persons in town beside ourselves have wished for the honour of your presence. Dr. John Lord has written a delightful historical address, and the early days of the old Academy were most interesting, even if some of the later ones have not been!2
     My mother and my sister and I hope that you will give us the pleasure of coming to stay with us. I hope that you will not say that South Berwick is near Portsmouth, and so deprive us of a little visit!
     Believe me, ever with great regard,
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     Please give my love to Carrie.3 I wish that it were not so long since I saw her last. Perhaps she can come with you?

     NOTES
     1 The centennial celebration of the founding of Berwick Academy, of which Miss Jewett and her sister Mary were alumnae, was to be held on July 1, 189l.
    2 For this occasion AMemorial of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of Berwick Academy, South Berwick, Maine was published. A volume of 118 pages, it includes contributions by the school's most illustrious graduates: a "Preface" by Miss Jewett, "The Historical Address" by the Reverend Lord, and "The Oration" by the Reverend William Hayes Ward. The Reverend Peabody provided the opening "Prayer."
     3 Caroline Eustis Peabody (1848-1932) was one of Dr. Peabody's eight children. From his letter (Colby College Library) to Miss Jewett on July 3, 1891, it appears that Carrie did not attend, and that the "arrangements were superlatively good, and were carried through admirably."


53 F. HOPKINSON SMITH
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 15, 1891

    My dear Mr. Hopkinson Smith:

     I spent a delightful evening with our valued friend Colonel Carter who arrived yesterday morning from Virginia.1 I have such sympathy for his charm and nobility of character that it delights me to think that you can always help him out of any trouble he may fall into through generosity and loyalty to the traditions of the past. Seriously, you must never let him come to want, you must stand ready to write him into good fortune at any moment!
     The story makes a charming little book. I congratulate you upon giving so much real pleasure and I hope that Colonel Carter may wake this very morning and find himself famous like Byron, but I shall always count myself one of the first and best of his friends.2
     With my best thanks, and regards to your wife, believe me ever
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Colonel Carter of Cartersville (Boston, 1891) was the first book to bring widespread public attention to Smith. A devotée of his work, Miss Jewett had written to him about his two earlier books (see Letters 29, 33, 34).
    2 Of Miss Jewett's reaction to his books, Smith wrote (Colby College Library): "Next to the pleasure of writing a story like the Colonel -- and it has been an exquisite pleasure -- is the delight of receiving such letters as yours. Especially yours for you know, which is everything, and you tell me so cheerfully and heartily, which is best of all."


54 MARY LANMAN FERRIS
     Mary Lanman Douw Ferris (1855-1932), editor of the American Author, writer on historical and genealogical topics, particularly about old New York. Mrs. Ferris published a number of uncopyrighted brochures of juvenile rhymes and stories, but it is uncertain whether the project discussed in this letter came to fruition.

     South Berwick, Maine
     August 8, 189I

    Dear Mrs. Ferris:

     You will find in my volume of stories for children, called Play Days, some verses -- "Discontent"1 -- which have been used sometimes for a like collection to your own.2
     There are some other slight verses in the earlier volumes of St. Nicholas, one which I remember just now about four-leaved clovers.3 Perhaps you mean to use prose selections and these you will find, beside the Play Days stories, a number of others in St. Nicholas and Wide Awake.4
     But of course you will have to speak with the publishers about these as my permission alone will not be enough. Messrs. Houghton Mifflin & Co. have always been willing to allow the use of "Discontent," but I don't know what they would decide about the sketches.
     Believe me, with thanks,
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Appeared originally in St. Nicholas, III (February 1876), 247; collected in Play Days and in Verses; quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 11th ed., 1938.
     2 In Grace Townsend (editor), The Youth's Companion at Home and School (Chicago, 1891), 73-74.
     3 "Perseverance," St. Nicholas, X (September 1883), 840-841; collected in Verses as "A Four-Leaved Clover."
     4Wide Awake, edited at this time by Ella Farman Pratt and Charles Stuart Pratt, was a juvenile journal that catered to the same audience as St. Nicholas. Miss Jewett had contributed half a dozen short stories and one poem to it.


55 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     September 9, 1891

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I thank you for your letter, and promise as far as the business part is concerned to keep the story in mind.
     We had heard of Mrs. Scudder's mother's death by way of our friends in North Hampton1 and I was sorry for you both in such a change and loss as must have fallen upon you. My mother's weary illness still goes on. I hoped that the bright autumn weather would do her good, but she has been very ill and uncomfortable of late, I am sorry to say.
     It is pleasant to hear of your life at Chocorua!2
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     Please remember me very kindly to Mrs. Scudder and Sylvia.3

     NOTES
     1 The family of Miss Jewett's mother resided throughout this southern sector of New Hampshire, including Exeter, Rye, and Little Boar's Head.
     2 A small community of summer homes in the White Mountains of New Hampshire populated in the latter half of the nineteenth century largely by persons of literary or artistic prominence: painters Benjamin Champney and J. F. Kensett, philosophers William James and William E. Hocking, poets William Vaughn Moody and Edwin Arlington Robinson, editors Horace E. Scudder and Ferris Greenslet, educators Abraham Flexner, Francis J. Child, George F. Baker. Henry James and William Dean Howells came often to stay with William James, and Whittier and Lucy Larcom vacationed in nearby Ossipee. Miss Jewett used to visit the Reverend Treadwell Walden, rector of the Episcopal Cathedral in Boston, at his cottage in Wonalancet.
     3 Scudder's daughter, later Mrs. Ingersoll Bowditch of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.


56 EDWIN W. MORSE
     The Book Buyer (1867-1918)was the monthly house organ of Scribner's, originally devoted to announcements of the firm's publications, later admitting notices of other publishers. Edwin Wilson Morse (1855-1924) succeeded Frank Nelson Doubleday as editor in 1887 and remained in that position until 1894.

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 6, 1891
     To the Editor of The Book Buyer

     My dear Sir:

     I thank you for your very kind note, but I am sorry to say that it will be impossible for me to promise to do even so short and pleasant a bit of work as the notice of Mrs. Jackson's book.1
     May I take the liberty to suggest that you ask Miss Sarah C. (Susan Coolidge) Woolsey2 (93 Rhode Island Avenue, Newport) in my place? She has been so closely associated with Mrs. Jackson and her works and ways that I think she would write the notice charmingly.3
     Yours very truly,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) was noted for her poetry and philanthropy as well as for her novel Ramona. Miss Jewett is referring to her A Calendar of Sonnets, published posthumously by Roberts Brothers in Boston, 1891.
     2 Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835-1905) used the pen name "Susan Coolidge," attaining most of her fame through the juvenile What Katy Did stories. She made her home in Newport, Rhode Island, as did Mrs. Jackson for a time, and they traveled to California in 1872. Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields visited Miss Woolsey annually at her Newport home, Liberty Hall, and all three attended the Chicago World's Fair together in 1893.
     3 The Susan Coolidge review of Mrs. Jackson's A Calendar of Sonnets appeared in The Book Buyer Christmas Annual of December 1891.


57 AGNES BARTLETT BROWN
     Agnes Bartlett Brown (1847-1932),wife of J. Appleton Brown, was also an artist but not so widely known as her husband. She painted landscapes, flowers, and animals, specializing in cats. The Browns lived in the famous Quincy mansion in Boston and summered at Newburyport, coming into frequent contact with Miss Jewett in both localities.

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 17, [1891]

    Dear Mrs. Brown:

     I wonder if you still have that painting of the high green hillside in the twilight with the moon rising? I find myself thinking of it wistfully from time to time. Will you tell me if you have it, or if I can! -- and the price? It was in your last spring's exhibition.
     I am sorry that I have seen you so very little this summer. I was very glad to spend those unexpected few minutes with you in the Newburyport station. It has been such a sad summer to me with my mother's illness growing worse and worse. She is very very ill just now and I think that the last few days have been worst of all. You can understand all this and the long nights and days.
     I am not sure whether you are still in Newburyport, but whether you are there or in New York, I send much love to you and Mr. Brown and my best regards to your sister.
     Yours affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett


58 HORACE E. SCUDDER
     South Berwick, Maine
     October 29, 1891

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     My sister and I thank you sincerely for your kind letter. It is of course a great comfort just now to think that my mother's long illness is over, but the loss of her presence is very hard to bear, and these are most sad days to us.1
     It was very kind in you to write, and we both send our kindest thanks to you, and to Mrs. Scudder for her messages.
     Your most truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 Miss Jewett's mother died October 21, 1891.


59 AGNES BARTLETT BROWN
     Wednesday morning
     [November-December 1891]

    My dear friend:

     I send you this cheque because I have a feeling that you would not like it so well if I changed the amount as I should really like to do. I feel as if you 'had it your way' and gave me the dear little picture! and I thank you most warmly. I care very much for your beautiful work and I wish that I could give you half so much pleasure with mine.1 I wish too that I could make you understand how sincerely and affectionately I am ever your friend
     S. O. J.

     NOTE
     1 As a young girl Miss Jewett dreamed of a career in art. She turned out numerous pen and ink drawings, and kept her hand in desultorily at watercolors and oils until late in life.



60 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON
     Robert Underwood Johnson (1853-1937) joined the staff of Century Magazine in 1873 as an editorial assistant, became associate editor in 1881, and editor from 1909 to 1913. He served as United States ambassador to Italy in 1920-1921. The Johnsons kept a summer home at York Harbor, Maine, and exchanged visits with Miss Jewett at South Berwick.

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 21, [1892]

    My dear friend:

     I thank you over and over again for the great pleasure I have had in your lovely book of poems,l and I thank you most for your kind remembrance. I cannot tell you with what feeling I read again the pages that I knew last spring in Venice and some of the lines of The Winter Hour belong to my life as much as to yours. I shall be always reading between those dear lines and remembering days that we both remember.2
     I did not need them to recall our friendship: but I put your white flower of a book into the safest place. I know how dear The Winter Hour must be to your wife3 -- it made it doubly beautiful to me because I knew something of your life together. God bless you both, dear friends! I send you my best Christmas wish and I wish for thyself that I may be so fortunate as to see you sometimes in the New Year.
     I saw Mrs. Fields a day or two ago and found her pretty well. We talked of you then -- we are pretty sure to think of you when we think of the spring and summer in Italy and France.
     I envy you the pleasure that your white book will give to every one, and so bring back to you.
     Pray believe me always
     Your sincere and affectionate friend,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1The Winter Hour, and Other Poems (New York, 1892).
     2 On their second trip to Europe in the summer of 1892 Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields crossed the ocean on the steamer Werra with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, then toured Italy and France together. Miss Jewett met Mark Twain in Venice, Madame Blanc and Brunetière in Paris, continued on to England where she romped with George Du Maurier's delightful dog at Whitby, and paid more formal calls on Tennyson, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Matthew Arnold's family.
     Miss Jewett's friendship with Horace E. Scudder was genuine and lifelong, but a conversation reported by Johnson in his Remembered Yesterdays (Boston, 1929), 392, reveals one of her thoroughly human traits: "I remember she had a dislike for Horace Scudder, one-time editor of the Atlantic, apropos of whom she said to me, 'What a strange world this is!' -- and then with a rapid zigzag forward gesture of her hand, -- 'full of scudders and things.' "
     3 Katherine McMahon Johnson (see headnote, Letter 117).



61 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     [January 27, 1893]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     Should you like to print this brief remembrance of yesterday in The Contributors' Club?1
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Date and topic are established by an annotation on page 4 of this letter: "In C. C. after Bishop Brooks's funeral." Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), rector of Trinity Church, Boston, and Bishop of Massachusetts, died January 23, 1893, and was buried on the 26th. The sketch appeared, unsigned, under the title "At the Funeral of Phillips Brooks," in The Contributors' Club, Atlantic Monthly, LXXI (April 1893), 566-567. See Miss Jewett to Mrs. George D. Howe in Fields, Letters, 107-108.


62 WILLIAM HAYES WARD
     William Hayes Ward (1835-1916),brother of Susan Hayes Ward, was an early Berwick friend of the Jewetts. He was successively associate editor, superintending editor, editor, and honorary editor of the Independent from 1868 to 1916. Miss Jewett's work began to appear in this semireligious weekly in 1871.

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 2, 1893

    My dear Mr. Ward:

     I am tempted to send you the enclosed slip from one of our Maine papers because I think that it may give you reason for a little essay in the Sunday Herald. It seems to me that there is such a good chance just now for impressing our architectural lesson upon the public mind! and emphasizing our need for holding fast to whatever we have that is characteristic in our town and state life. The Philadelphia exposition1 gave a new regard for our antiquities (our 'Centennial' chairs and plates!), and, if I am not mistaken, the Chicago exposition will teach us to be more careful about our buildings, both in preserving the old ones and in building after better fashions.2 I think one point that might be made is that nothing wins more praise and admiration at the World's Fair than the Hancock House, and though those who destroyed it thought they were building finer houses in its stead, the day has come when to live in the Hancock House itself would be the most charming distinction, and so there is a subtle revenge brought about by time!
     Forgive my writing such a long letter and forgive my suggestions about your writing on these points, but indeed I feel very grateful to you and -- is it not? -- your daughter3 for the thoughtful little papers which have had so much influence upon our New England life. They have been a most refining force in our smaller towns and quieter neighbourhoods, and many persons who can never thank you or even know whom they should thank are wiser and broader in thought for what you have said.
     I hope that you -- and the Herald generally -- will not let drop the Sunday question at Chicago.4 Last week when I was there I wondered if the Secretary of the Christian Endeavor Society knew what he was railing at. It seemed to me that he himself would be better and more intent upon growth, and helpfulness to others even, if he could spend a few hours among those wonderful buildings. It is certainly remote from anything trivial or degrading, that great enclosure whose gates he would bar to those who need the sight of it most. I could not help thinking as I stood with tears in my eyes before the Statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Park this very last Sunday and saw the people scattered all about, that anything was better than they should have been at home in their little houses, drowsing and chattering or spying their neighbours. I think as you do, that reverence and worship and serious thought are more likely to exist when Sunday afternoon at least is given wider outlooks and new experiences of nature and art, "the great revealer." And if people are going to dress for going out in the afternoon they are twice as likely to be in trim to go to church in the morning! And at Chicago nobody can see the great sights of that Exposition -- the great buildings and bridges and columns -- without being proud of his country, which is in itself one of the best things in the world.
     I have been wishing to see you to give you a message of kind remembrance which Mr. Arnold's daughter, Mrs. Wodehouse, gave me last Autumn for you. She spoke of her father's warm feeling for you and wished me to say that she and Mrs. Arnold remembered you most kindly. Mrs. Fields and I were visiting Mrs. Arnold. It was a most delightful thing to me to go into our friend's quiet study which they have kept as he left it.5
     Believe me with great regard
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 The Centennial Exposition of 1876 (see Letter 8, note 3).
     2 Miss Jewett proved a good prophet. The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago changed the trend of architecture in the United States and brought about a renaissance of classic styles.
     3 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911), author of numerous biographies and Biblical romances, notably The Gates Ajar, married Ward's son in 1888. With common sense and a touch of humor, she frequently depicted the mores and amenities, the heroes and misfits of New England culture in the pages of the Independent.
    4 For several weeks before and after the opening of the Columbian Exposition, the Boston Herald reported almost daily the controversy between politicians and sabbatarians as to whether the Fair should be open Sundays. Interest in the decision mounted as contradictory information reached the public. On May 4, 1893, the Herald stated: "Gates likely to be opened next Lord's Day"; on May 5, "Gates to be open -- World's Fair won't close Sundays"; on May 6, "Exposition will not be open next Sunday." The question was resolved by May 13: "Gates to be open every day after May 21st." For three years beginning January 8, 1891, the Independent kept up a running fire of commentary regarding Sunday operation of the Fair, highlighting the issue on April 23, 1891, with a nine-page symposium by representative clergymen of several sects.
     5 During his grand lecture tour of the United States, October 1883-March 1884, Matthew Arnold stayed for some time at Mrs. Fields's home in Boston. Miss Jewett met him there and cherished the memory of his sitting by the fire one evening, reading aloud "The Scholar Gipsy." Arnold died in 1888.
     In 1899 Arnold's daughter Eleanor married the Honorable Armine Wodehouse, an under-secretary in the British Foreign Office.


63 FREDERICK M. HOPKINS
     Starting as a reporter for the New York World, Frederick Mercer Hopkins (1864-1948) later occupied editorial positions on such magazines as Review of Reviews, Munsey's, Current Literature, and Harper's. A bibliophile and collector of considerable reputation, he wrote a section on rare books for more than two decades in the Publishers' Weekly.

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 22, 1893

    My dear Sir:

     I often keep up this average of writing but while I can keep even to a higher average for a week or so, I am not a steady worker like Mr. Howells,1 for instance, and I am apt to have long spaces between these seasons of writing, when I do hardly any writing at all except many letters, and occasional pages of memoranda. Sometimes I have written sketches of 6000 or 7000 words in a single day.2 Of course that is exceptional, but I am apt to be at work during five or six weeks and then stop, except that I am always thinking about my work.
     This is all I can say about my irregular fashions of getting my sketches done.
     About the other matter -- I certainly never expressed myself in those words about my town friends and neighbours. You know there is a saying of Plato's that the best thing one can do for the people of a State is to make them acquainted with each other, and it was some instinctive feeling of this sort which led me to wish that the town and country people were less suspicious of one another. When I was writing the Deephaven sketches not long after I was twenty and was beginning my Atlantic work,3 it was just the time when people were beginning to come into the country for the summer in such great numbers. It has certainly been a great means of broadening both townsfolk and country folk. I think nothing has done so much for New England in the last decade; it accounts for most of the enlargement and great gain that New England has certainly made, as if there had been a fine scattering or sowing broadcast of both thought and money! But twenty years ago city-people and country-people were a little suspicious of each other -- and, more than that, the only New Englander generally recognized in literature was the caricatured Yankee.
     I tried to follow Mrs. Stowe in those delightful early chapters of The Pearl of Orr's Island4in writing about people of rustic life just as they were. Now there are a great many stories with this intention, but twenty years ago there were hardly any.5 'Human nature is the same the world over' but somehow the caricature of the Yankee, the Irishman, the Frenchman takes its place first, and afterwards comes a more true and sympathetic rendering. This is a most interesting subject, is it not?6
     Pardon so long a letter, which I have been obliged to write in great haste, and believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 William Dean Howells was one of the most productive of major American authors, turning out over one hundred volumes of fiction, travel, criticism, biography, drama, and poetry, as well as anthologies, introductions, reviews, and editorial commentary.
     2 Miss Jewett's estimates of her output varied. A consensus of several newspaper statements shows that she did write sporadically, as her spirit willed. Ordinarily she worked from immediately following luncheon to suppertime -- sometimes as long as from eleven forenoon to late at night -- but she took frequent holidays from writing. She averaged some 2500 words most days, but as many as 8000 on others, seldom reworking her manuscripts. She might perhaps have rivaled Howells' record had she not applied herself so assiduously to personal correspondence, which she attended to promptly every morning, not uncommonly penning thirty or more letters at a sitting.
     3 Deephaven, Miss Jewett's first published volume, was a collection of regional sketches revised and reprinted from contributions to the Atlantic Monthly from September 1873 to September 1876. [The Plato quotation comes from Book V of "Laws," in which Socrates does not appear: "for there is no greater good in a state than that the citizens should be known to one another." (Research: Jack V. Wales, Jr. of the Thacher School, Ojai, CA.)]
    4 Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) conceived the characters and began to write her oft-interrupted novel The Pearl of Orr's Island (Boston, 1862) while her husband was professor of Biblical literature at Bowdoin College. Miss Jewett read the book when she was thirteen or fourteen years old and was struck by its strength and pungency. Later she classified it as "an incomplete piece of work" and determined to write with greater simplicity and harmony about the lives of coastal and back-country New Englanders.
     Miss Jewett evidently first saw Mrs. Stowe in late summer of 1878. Mrs. Fields, who was on more intimate terms with Mrs. Stowe and eventually wrote her biography, introduced Miss Jewett to her in Hartford in 1884. Miss Jewett subsequently met Mrs. Stowe several times at the Newton country home and Boston town house of Governor and Mrs. William Claflin.
     5 In this interim Mrs. Stowe had been joined in her homely depiction of New England scene and character by Alice Brown, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Lucy Larcom, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, all of whom had established themselves in the rapidly growing ranks of American local colorists.
     6 Miss Jewett's concern with this "most interesting subject" was brought to the fore again by her publisher's decision to issue a Holiday Edition of Deephaven, sensitively illustrated by her friends Charles and Marcia Woodbury. The date on the title page is 1894, but the book actually appeared in November 1893.Miss Jewett provided a new preface for it in October 1893, rephrasing many of the sentiments expressed in the latter half of this letter, which seems to have been used as a basis for the preface. See Richard Cary, "Jewett, Tarkington, and the Maine Line," Colby Library Quarterly, IV (February 1956), 89-95; Fields, Letters, 228; and Letter 137in this volume. Miss Jewett sought to effectuate Plato's dictum through her sympathetic Irish-American and French-Canadian stories.


64 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 16, 1893

    My dear Mr. Scudder:

     I am sorry that I could not get "The Only Rose"1 copied, or make a better looking manuscript myself, but I have had much trouble in using my hand, and I could not give it to some one who can usually do typewriting for me. I hope it is all plain if it is untidy! and that you will like it. I shall be here after this week in case of the proofs being ready. I do not suppose that will be at once. I am to be at Manchester over Sunday, (and at Naushon2 for a few days first). But after that anything may be sent here.
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     I should have sent a note in answer to yours, which came to Richfield,3 but I expected to see you at 4 Park St.4 on my way home.

     NOTES
     1Atlantic Monthly, LXXIII (January 1894), 37-46; collected in The Life of Nancy.
    2 Miss Jewett periodically visited the family of John M. Forbes, the railroad builder, who owned this island off the coast of Massachusetts. Emerson's daughter Edith was married to Forbes's son William. The island was a haven for summer and autumn guests who entertained themselves at boating, fishing, riding, and hunting. Miss Jewett relished most the invigorating cruises along the Maine coast in the Forbes majestic sailing yacht Merlin.
    3 Miss Jewett, a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism of limbs and back, usually put up at the Spring House in Richfield Springs, New York, when seeking alleviation of her condition in the local waters. At other times she tried to find relief at Wells Beach and Poland Spring, Maine; at Hot Springs, Virginia; at St. Augustine, Florida; and at Aix-les-Bains, France.
     4 Site of the Quincy mansion that now housed the publishing offices of Houghton Mifflin Company on the first floor and those of the Atlantic Monthly on the second.


65 LYMAN ABBOTT
     Lyman Abbott (1835-1922), son of Jacob Abbott the Maine author of the Rollo books, was co-editor with Henry Ward Beecher of the Christian Union from 1876 to 1881, after which he became editor-in-chief. In 1893 the name of the periodical was changed to the Outlook.

     January 18, [1894]
 

     Miss S. O. Jewett wishes Mr. Abbott to know that his letter of Jan'y l0th was neglected by reason of her severe illness which will prevent her sending the desired reply. A photograph for the purpose he mentions1 can be had at Pollocks, 2 Hamilton Place, Boston.

     NOTE
     1 "The Courting of Sister Wisby" appeared in the Outlook, L (October 13,1894), 583-587, with a portrait of the author.


66 CHARLES JERVIS GILMAN
     Charles Jervis Gilman (1824-1901), father of the Brunswick Gilman family, was a successful lawyer and U.S. Congressman but preferred the role of squire, raising prime crops, cattle, and poultry. He devoted himself to several business enterprises that gradually eroded his own and his wife's wealth.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     March 6, [1894]

    Dear Cousin Charles:

     Will you please to have a case or good sized jug of water sent to

     Mrs. Joseph S. Cabot1
     34 Beacon St.
     Boston
as soon as possible, marked from the Paradise Spring2 -- perhaps the bottles would be best as they are marked. I found my friend quite ready to try it as she had not been quite satisfied with her Poland Water of late! I will give her my circular next time I see her if you will just send the water. I have told her how much I liked it and that the spring is on my cousins' land so that I know ALL about it, but I have not made any personal matter of the business because she likes to feel free, and not to disappoint her friends if she decides against a thing. I have known her to give up having pictures and things sent because of that reason and she was afraid she shouldn't like them -- so I have been dreadfully impersonal about the Paradise Spring Company, only praising the water with a loud voice! If you aren't quite ready to speak of the agency perhaps if she likes it you could send the water right up from Brunswick only sending her the circular when you are ready to have her order it in town. She would use a good deal and I hope influence some others. Be sure I shall do all I can. And forgive me for writing in such haste.
     Yours affectionately,
     S. O. Jewett
     Love to Cousin Alice.

     NOTES
     1 Mrs. Susan Burley Cabot (1822-1907), wife of a former mayor of Salem, at whose home Miss Jewett spent part of the winter each year. Though separated in age by over a quarter-century, the two women enjoyed a mutually stimulating friendship. Miss Jewett dedicated The Queen's Twin and Other Stories "To Susan Burley Cabot."
     2 The Paradise Spring bottling company was one of Gilman's schemes to restore his fortune. The spring ran through a tract originally granted to the Dunlap family, on the road to Bath about a mile from Brunswick. The naturally filtered water, although excellent, never managed to replace the Poland Spring brand in popular favor. Miss Jewett was an habitual user of curative waters (see Letter 64, note 3).


67 LOUIS A. HOLMAN
     Louis Arthur Holman (1866-1939), author, publisher, illustrator, and authority on Keats, was art editor of the New England Magazine from 1890 to 1896 and assistant art editor of Youth's Companion from 1896 to 1914. He wrote a series of monographs on Dürer, Rembrandt, and lesser artists, as well as volumes on The Graphic Processes, Old Maps and Their Makers, and Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin.

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 22, 1894

     Dear Mr. Holman:

     I cannot find a suitable picture of the old academy building for direct reproduction, but will you be so kind as to make a sketch from the enclosed stereoscopic view, gate and all, which will serve our purpose and be of greatest interest to most of our readers. I send you a photograph of Hon. Francis B. Hayes1 which does not belong to me and is of great value to the possessor. I am delighted with your list of illustrations, and perhaps you can show or send them to me the evening of the 30th or morning of the 31st when I shall be at 148 Charles St. in town. I hope that you prepared Mr. Mead2 for our having a long paper? I shall be likely to shorten it in proof however.3
     Believe me with very kind regards
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 The Honorable Francis B. Hayes (1819-1884), president of the Board of Trustees of Berwick Academy, supervised its rebuilding after the fire of 1851.He was a lawyer, judge, member of the State Legislature, and a financier noted for his philanthropies.
     2 Edwin D. Mead (1849-1937),editor of the New England Magazine from 1889 to 1901. An active advocate in the causes of world peace and good citizenship, he was also biographer of Luther, Emerson, and Carlyle.
     3 The final version of "The Old Town of Berwick," New England Magazine, n.s. X (July 1894), 585-609, ran to twenty-four pages. It contains twenty-two photographs and drawings, four of which (including the old academy) were done by Holman.



68 ANDRESS S. FLOYD
     Andress Small Floyd (1873-1933) of Saco, Maine, had planned to become a lawyer but at this time began to think of authorship as a career and wrote to Miss Jewett during a long convalescence. Eventually he migrated from his home state and produced My Monks of Vagabondia (Union, New Jersey, 1913), a volume of "fact-stories" collected from the files of the Self Master magazine.

     South Berwick, Maine
     November 11, 1894

    My dear Mr. Floyd:

     Your letter interests me very much and I shall certainly give you the best advice I can.
     In the first place you make a great mistake in thinking that editors are careless about new writers. I believe that 'new blood' counts for more in this profession than any other. You see that a new writer of real talent usually wins success at once for the newspapers and magazines are always on the lookout for what in brief we may call novelties! In no business, I am sure, does the quality of a person's work get such instant credit. But then the editors must keep their pages full and for this, 'novelties' being rare! they have to depend upon what has come to being called a Staff of writers. All this I need but to remind you of and not to explain at length. It is my experience too that it hinders an editor's interest in an unknown writer's manuscript to have it brought in with an introduction: it is apt to make him think that it is afraid to come on its own merits, and so I advise you always to send your stories straight to the office on their own feet.
     It is, after all, a business like any other and a writer must go into its market and learn the laws of that, and what I might almost call the personality of the different magazines and the line of articles which seems to naturally belong to them. While one's personal experience and knowledge count for almost more than in any other business, one can hardly expect at first or as an amateur to catch hold at once! any more than he could accomplish much by taking a day or two in the law or at real estate brokerage.
     Now then! I should advise you to try some of your work and see what it does for itself. I think that the Portland Transcript pays something and Mr. Pickard1 is a most appreciative and valuable man as its editor. And the Youth's Companion prints a great many articles and covers a wide range and pays very well. You probably know its character and how it likes brief sketches of adventure and everyday life, and it can give work to many people at once. I should study it a little and perhaps aim some of your papers directly for a certain department and say so when you send them. As for your long story, of course I cannot speak intelligently not knowing of what sort it may be, and I am so busy just now that I ought not to think of asking to see it. But if you could send me a chapter next week and one of your short sketches, I would tell you anything that occurred to me.
     I do not often like to say this, but I am interested in the manly way in which you have turned to my own business when your chosen work seems to have been so sadly put aside for the present. But the best advice I have to give is that you look upon it as a distinct profession which may be learnt like any other. Though no profession can be so furthered by natural gifts, there are many departments in journalism and magazine work which hard work can master and in which really valuable work may be done if one will take the trouble. I should think that your own experience in the study of the law might be made very interesting. My father used to give me this excellent advice: "Don't try to write about things: write the things themselves just as they are."2
     With kindest regards, believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Samuel Thomas Pickard (1828-1915), editor and part owner of the Portland Transcript for four decades. Nephew by marriage to Whittier, he became his literary executor and official biographer, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston, 1894), 2 vols. Pickard had published Miss Jewett's obituary of "Mrs. Osgood of Bar Mills," in the Transcript (March 22, 1893), 51.
     2 A paraphrase of her father's words quoted in "Looking Back on Girlhood," Youth's Companion, LXV (January 7, 1892), 5-6. Compare with Letters 2, note 3; 25, note 2; 99.


69 ANDRESS S. FLOYD
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     November 22, 1894

    Dear Mr. Floyd:

     I have read your short story and the chapter and the verses and I do not think they are by any means as good work as you with your experience of life ought to do. The verses have so much simplicity and dramatic touch that they interested me a good deal, especially in your sense of fine art in the way you used the refrain. But they lack finish -- the rhyme and sometimes the metre are not well worked out. The short story is not so good as the chapter. I find it boyish and crude in its plot, which may be good but should not have been turned upon so serious a subject as the hero's affection! Don't you see what I mean?
     I am sure that one should always try to write of great things in a great way and with at least 'imaginative realism.' There is nothing so good in what you have sent me as the scene between the hero of your novel and the little girl with the books and patchwork -- you have done a beautiful thing there!
     Now I am going to advise you to try some short sketches in this direction. Remember that the typical man or woman is better than the specimen in such work: try to make use of your own experience, in your studies, in your illness and its associations which must have taught you many things. There is a delightful book of Stories by C. H. White, who is a brilliant young lawyer in Boston named Chaplin.1 There is a story called "A [Five] Hundred Dollars" and another still better, I cannot remember the title but you can easily look it up. I don't think I should trust to powers of invention yet in writing, if I were you, but rather to my experience and sympathy and imagination. Don't mind how brief your stories are. I can see how you could take Tiny and the young man and make a beautiful sketch. He must often find a dull afternoon when he feels left out and defeated, and when grown people's sympathy doesn't help him, and Tiny comes with her patchwork and does a kinder work than she knows. Or one always likes stories of student life: a young lawyer's experiences, perhaps some unexpected professional calls, might be made very interesting.
     I can hardly tell much from the chapter of your novel. You will have to work over it, judging from this chapter. You have certainly planned it in a large way but to deal adequately with the great passions and situations of life asks for great talents and for still greater patience. I do not know enough myself to be of much assistance, but if you will believe in your novel you must give your best self to it and have 'the courage of your opinions.'
     With kindest wishes, believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     I hope that you will feel at liberty to write again, if I can be of assistance about your work.2 I hope that you are able to keep on with your professional reading. I wonder if you ever read the Life ofFawcett, the English statesman and postmaster general?3 It is such a lesson for all of us. You remember that he was stricken with blindness in the middle of his early activity and bravely made a plan for himself by which he was able to keep on. When one thinks of it, how few of us do not have to battle against some incapacity: lack of strength or some other hindrance! I think Fawcett's example has been an astonishing help to many men and women.

     NOTES
     1 Heman White Chaplin (1847-1924) was the grandson of the Reverend Jeremiah Chaplin, first president of Colby College. Miss Jewett is referring to his pseudonymic volume on Massachusetts fishermen and country folk, Five Hundred Dollars, and Other Stories of New England Life (Boston, 1887), which ran into several editions. Under his own name, Chaplin turned out books on legal problems and industrial relations.
     2 Floyd apparently did not write again. Miss Jewett's two letters to him were incorporated by his daughter Olive Beatrice Floyd in "Sarah Orne Jewett's Advice to a Young Writer," Yale Review XXVI (December 1936), 430-432. With understandable constraint Miss Floyd omitted from her published version Miss Jewett's harsher strictures and her references to Chaplin and Fawcett.
     3 Leslie Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett (London, 1885). Henry Fawcett, blinded in a shooting accident in 1858, nevertheless took active part in the social and athletic life at Cambridge, made a reputation as a writer and teacher of political economy, and in 1880 became Gladstone's postmaster general.



70 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     November 23, 1894

     Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I send you the story1 but I hope to make it still better when I have the proof to work upon. I hope that you will like it, and that I shall like it better when I see it again! Just now I have been working over it too long, which always seems a pity, or rather makes the story itself seem a pity!
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "The Life of Nancy," Atlantic Monthly, LXXV (February 1895), 175-187; collected in The Life of Nancy.



71 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     December 21, 1894

     Dear Mr. Johnson:

     I thank you so much for your note and I should have answered it at once, but I have been ill with a very bad attack of bronchitis which keeps me in bed yet. I send the cheque for Mr. Newman's1 picture -- oddly enough I found your note about it a fortnight ago just as I left home, speaking of the price, etc., and said to myself that Mr. Newman must have forgotten it. I shall be very glad if you will send it here.
     I am sorry about the "Sad Captains."2 I shall be so glad if they do get printed and done with at last! I was just in the middle of a fine spin of work when I was taken so ill, but I shall have to put by everything now for a while.
     Mrs. Fields is very well and sends her best regards with mine and kindest Christmas wishes to you and Mistress Kate.3
     Ever your sincere and affectionate friend
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Presumably Henry Roderick Newman (c1843-1918), American artist who spent most of the last half-century of his life in Florence, Italy, and in Egypt. In high favor among amateurs, he specialized in water colors of architectural subjects, landscapes, and flower pieces. A gifted conversationalist, he counted among his friends Ruskin, Browning, Henry James, and Hawthorne.
     2 "All My Sad Captains," Century, L (September 1895), 736-748; collected in The Life of Nancy. Johnson had evidently accepted the story but then reported that there would be a delay of some months before it could be published.
     3 Mrs. Katharine McMahon Johnson (see headnote, Letter 117).


72 SARAH CHANDLER PERRY
     Sarah Chandler Perry was the wife of John T. Perry, Miss Jewett's maternal uncle in Cincinnati (see Genealogical Chart).

     South Berwick, Maine
     January 25, 1895

     Dear Aunt Sarah:

     I should be ashamed to write my thanks for your kindness so long after Christmas, if you did not know that I had a pretty good reason for silence. My croaking voice recovered some time ago but something has seemed to be the matter when I tried to use a pen! I have had to neglect a great many letters before Christmas as well as after. But I liked your pretty Whittier spoon very much and I shall keep it in my possession as long as I can and not let it seem to lose identity among the family stores of tea spoons. Mary and I happened to come upon some of Mr. Whittier's letters yesterday and one of them was written upon a sheet of paper with a picture of the birthplace at top. It is wonderful how much the silversmith contrived to get on the little space of the spoon.
     I came home on Monday with Mrs. Fields for company, and Mary got home next day from Worcester where she has had a delightful visit. We so seldom have a winter visit from Mrs. Fields that we are enjoying it very much but I am sorry to say she must go away today.
     I have got well very slowly and walked about the yard after I got home for the first time since the first week in December that I could go out afoot. It has been a tiresome siege, but now I really begin to think about my dusty stories again.
     We have been so sorry to hear that Auntie was ill. I hope that you and Uncle John will take good care of yourselves.
     With much love to both
     S. O. J.


73 DANA ESTES

     South Berwick, Maine
     February 3,[1895]

    Dear Mr. Estes:

     I cannot refuse to let my name stand on such a committee, but I am afraid that I cannot promise to do much service. I am still very far from well, and find it most difficult to take up my affairs again. You give me great pleasure by what you tell me of Miss Hersey's1 interest and kindness in speaking of my work and for reading "Decoration Day."2 In fact the newspaper reports, brief as they were, gave me much pleasure. I do not stand exactly in the position of most of the members of the projected society of Daughters of Maine,3 as I count myself entirely a Maine person and not a (transplanted) Boston citizen even though I may spend many weeks of the winter within the limits of Ward Nine!
     I thank you for your kindness and interest and I congratulate you on the success of the Maine Dinner.
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Heloise Edwina Hersey (1855-1933), born in Oxford, Maine, was a professor of English at Smith College and a Browning scholar, an editorial writer for Youth's Companion, and a popular lecturer. At this time she was conducting a school for girls in Boston.
     2 Harper's LXXXV (June 1892), 84-90; collected in A Native of Winby. Miss Jewett once told Laura Richards that, if she were remembered for any of her stories, she hoped it might be this one.
     3 The Daughters of Maine Club was organized in Massachusetts in January 1892 and incorporated in July 1895. One stipulation of its constitution: "Membership in this Club shall be restricted to women who were born in the State of Maine." This society was the female counterpart of the Pine Tree State Club.


74 MRS. ROGERS
     Unidentified.

 

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     February 7, [1895]
 

     Dear Mrs. Rogers:

     You left me a lovely gift of flowers and I have been enjoying them so very much that I wished to thank you by break of day! When one loses the great pleasure of being well and keeping at work there seems to be a kind of beggary of happiness set in, which can only be relieved by the kind thought of one's friends! Somehow these lovely pinks brought me a very great pleasure.
     I hope to see you soon, but I shall long be sorry about missing the luncheon.
     Believe me
     Yours sincerely and affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett


75 FREDERICK M. HOPKINS
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 27, 1895
 

     Dear Sir:

     You will have to say that Miss Jewett was seriously ill the greater part of the winter (after an attack of the nature of pneumonia) and has been forced to lay aside her writing affairs. There will be a story in one of the summer numbers of the Century, written last year or earlier.1 The sketch published in Harper's, May 1892, called "Decoration Day," has kept its hold surprisingly and is making part of the exercises of the day this year. It was translated into French last summer and figured in the Revue des Deux Mondes.2
     I am sorry that I can only think of these few most meagre notes but perhaps you can use them as suggestions that will serve your purpose.
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett
     It would be very good if you could find room to speak of the really charming book of Celia Thaxter's Letters edited by Mrs. J. T. Fields and Miss Lamb.3 It is a book so vitalized by a delightful and vigorous personality that its readers must lay it down with the feeling of having made a new friend. The refinement of the editing is a contrast to much biographical work that has been done of late. The portraits are inadequately reproduced, but as for the work of the editors and printers nothing better could be asked. It is understood that Miss S. O. Jewett is to prepare a volume of Mrs. Thaxter's stories for children4 for the press later in the season.
     (Mrs. Thaxter's letters are just published and I should like very much to have you print the above notes. Please do not quote from me in using them,5 and may I count on you destroying this letter altogether, for such things which serve a friend's purpose in their day have a very different sound and misconstruction later. I am indeed sorry to send you such untidy pages.)6

     NOTES
     1 "All My Sad Captains," Century, L (September 1895), 736-748; collected in The Life of Nancy.
    2 "Le Jour de la Décoration," Revue des Deux Mondes, CXXIV (August 1, 1894), 650-663.
     3 Celia Thaxter (1835-1894), popular poet and writer of juveniles, was a close friend of Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields, both of whom visited her regularly in her Appledore Island home in the Isles of Shoals. Although barren, this set of seven islands ten miles from Portsmouth harbor attracted authors, painters, musicians, philosophers, and academicians all year round.
     Miss Jewett almost always alluded to Mrs. Thaxter as "Sandpiper," after her well-known poem of that name, and Mrs. Thaxter reciprocated by signing her letters with a sketch of the small bird. As a matter of fact, Miss Jewett's clique was addicted to pet names. Mrs. Thaxter called Miss Jewett "Owlet"; Louise Imogen Guiney was "Linnet"; Mary Greenwood Lodge was "Marigold"; Louisa Dresel answered to "Loulie," and Georgina Halliburton to "Wags"; in most letters Miss Jewett called Mrs. Fields "Mouse," "Fuff," "Fuffy," and occasionally "Fuffatee"; Miss Jewett was dubbed "Sadie Martinot" by the Aldriches but preferred her own invention of "Pinny Lawson" -- "Pinny" because she was "so straight and thin and her head no bigger than a pin," and "Lawson" after Harriet Beecher Stowe's raconteur, Sam Lawson of Oldtown Folks.
     Letters of Celia Thaxter (Boston, 1895) was edited "by her friends A. F. and R. L." -- Annie Fields and Rose Lamb.
     Rose Lamb (1843-1927) was a Boston neighbor of Mrs. Fields and a member of her group, particularly active in philanthropic work. A pupil of William Morris Hunt, she attained some renown as a water colorist. She spent numerous summers at the Isles of Shoals and traveled extensively in Europe.
     4 Mrs. Thaxter's Stories and Poems for Children (Boston, 1895) contained an untitled, one-page preface signed "S. O. J." Miss Jewett also wrote a four-page preface to the Appledore Edition of The Poems of Celia Thaxter (Boston, 1896).
     5 Hopkins had undoubtedly solicited material for the "Literary Chat" department of Munsey's Magazine. In the September 1895 issue appears a recognizable paraphrase of Miss Jewett's recommendation. After praising the "beauty and naturalness" with which Mrs. Thaxter invested her poems with a sense of mountains, salt breezes and surf, the item goes on to say: "In her letters we find, as we might expect, the same thrill of the sea that pervades her verse, the same tremendous, overwhelming love of nature. It is a genuine treat to read these letters, so ably and sympathetically edited, for in the reading we are brought very near to a personality our literature could ill afford to lose" (681). No mention of Miss Jewett's activities was made at this time.
     6 Miss Jewett had obviously not recovered from the serious illness to which she refers. The handwriting of this letter is uncharacteristically infirm.


76 FRED HOLLAND DAY
     Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), wealthy, eccentric bachelor of Norwood, Massachusetts, and Five Islands, Maine, founded the publishing firm of Copeland & Day in 1893.

     July 2, [1895]

    Dear Mr. Day:

     I see that there is a new volume of Mr. Francis Thompson's poems.1 Will you be so kind as to send me two copies? I should like to have one of the posters for Miss Brown's Meadowgrass2 if you have one to spare and I [don't ask for it too la] te.3
     I wish that I had asked you the other day if you had any other books beside the Atalanta from the Kelmscott Press.4 When you are sending the little package with Miss Brown's stories, etc., will you please put in anything else that you think that I might like to have, and I can return them at once if they are not to be kept.
     Mrs. Fields (who is here) was delighted, as I was, with the memorial to Stevenson by L. I. G. & A. B.5 I wish that Mr. Copeland's beautiful Atlantic essay6 had as fine a setting!
     Believe me
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 A fifth edition of Francis Thompson's Poems (Boston, 1895) published by Copeland & Day.
     2 Alice Brown, Meadow-grass: Tales of New England Life (Boston, 1895) published by Copeland & Day.
     3 Five words are conjecturally supplied; the letter is torn here.
     4 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (Hammersmith, 1894).
     5 Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study (Boston, 1895) by A. B., with a prelude and postlude by L. I. G., published by Copeland & Day. "A. B." is Alice Brown (1857-1948), who wrote novels and short stories mainly of New England rural life; "L. I. G." is Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), Boston poet and essayist.
     6 "Robert Louis Stevenson," Atlantic Monthly, LXXV (April 1895), 537-546, by Charles Townsend Copeland (1860-1952), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University from 1892 to 1928, who was born in Calais, Maine. While still a Boston journalist, he became a regular visitor at 148 Charles Street, eventually introducing Mark A. DeWolfe Howe to Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett in their "shrine of associations." Copeland admired the simple force of Miss Jewett's work and gave "A White Heron" high place in his repertoire of public readings.


77 ALFRED E. KEET
     Alfred Ernest Keet served as assistant editor to Walter Hines Page on the Forum, and as editor from 1895 to 1897. An active free-lance writer after this period, Keet produced poetry, articles on labor and politics, and appreciations of Stephen Crane.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     November 18, [1895]

     My dear Mr. Keet:

     I send you Madame Blanc's paper1 which I have had translated as well as possible and worked over to the best of my own ability, wishing all the time that the charming style of the original manuscript could be better kept. The proofs may be sent to me at this address, when they are ready. For the present I shall be still in the country (at South Berwick, Maine) and I beg that you will call upon me at any time if I can do anything further about the paper.
     Yours very truly,
     Sarah Orne Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Marie Thérèse Blanc wrote under the name "Th. Bentzon" (see headnote, Letter 91). This article, "Family Life in America," appeared in the Forum, XXI (March 1896), 1-20. It is a condensation of her series "upon the condition of women in the United States," published in the Revue des Deux Mondes during 1895.


78 ALFRED E. KEET
 

     December [1895]

     ... 1... variety and an air of ease and liberty in the use of material. I should not be giving a successful editor this long lecture, but I must say that Madame Blanc after her accustomed thirty or forty pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes probably thought that she was condensing in a remarkable way.2
     I wished to tell you in case the proof is not ready before the third of January that I shall not be able to read it as I am going to the West Indies etc. on a long yachting voyage.3 So that I shall be glad to see the copy again in whatever form it comes and I shall do all I can to leave it in good shape.
     With very kind regards, believe me
     Yours truly,
     S. O. Jewett
     I beg that you will pardon my untidy letter which I have written with a stiff hand and most awkwardly.
     It would be a great help to me if you would put a pencil line by some of the paragraphs whose use you question in the article.4

     NOTES
     1 This is a fragment, the only part which seems to have survived.
     2 This article (see Letter 77, note 1) ran to twenty pages. Madame Blanc's review of A Country Doctor ("Le Roman de la Femme-Médecin," Revue des Deux Mondes, LXVII [February 1, 1885], 598-632) -- Miss Jewett's first foreign notice -- is thirty-five pages long.
     3 In January 1896 Miss Jewett set out on a two-months cruise of the Caribbean islands with Mrs. Fields and the Thomas Bailey Aldriches on the steam yacht Hermione, owned by Henry L. Pierce, a former mayor of Boston.
     4 In 1896 papers by Madame Blanc also appeared in the July Scribner's and the October Century, so it would seem that Miss Jewett expended considerable effort marketing her friend's literary product. This was not an unusual activity for Miss Jewett who was constantly recommending her friends' writings to editors. In addition, she gave her time unstintedly to encourage and assist unfledged writers, although often it meant interrupting her own literary labors (see Letters 46, 56, 75, 80, 103, 108, 141). As for herself, she was proud to say, "I had no literary friends 'at court.' "


79 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     Friday afternoon
     [Spring 1896]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I thank you for your very kind note. I have been hoping to go to 4 Park Street every day but I came back ill, and the owner of what you might call either a lame or a game eye, so that both business and pleasure have been neglected. I have the better part of a new sketch done of Mrs. Todd and an island hermitage1 and I shall finish it before I do anything else.
     I hope that you and Mrs. Scudder have had a good winter, and I shall ask you eagerly for news from Bryn Mawr.2
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Published as untitled Chapter XIV of The Country of the Pointed Firs in the Atlantic Monthly, LXXVIII (July 1896), 83-86; called "The Hermitage" when issued in book form later that year.
     2 Scudder's daughter Sylvia was in      her freshman year at Bryn Mawr College at this time.



80 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON

     Manchester, Mass.
     Tuesday
     [August 18, 1896]

    My dear friend:

     I am sadly ashamed to have kept this advance copy so long!1 I have been at Ashfield for a few days and I forgot to send it back as I meant to do last Thursday without fail. It turns upon my desk with a reproachful countenance. Thank you so much for sending it to me. I enjoyed it even more than I expected, which is as much as can possibly be said.
     This will be the best of days at York. I know such weather well there.
     With best thanks and remembrance.
     Yours ever sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     You couldn't do better than to print Mr. Norton's address2 at the dedication of a tablet to G. W. Curtis!3 It was most beautiful and I say it who heard it at Ashfield last week. I wish you had been there.

     NOTES
     1 In a letter from York Harbor, Maine, dated August 8, 1896, Johnson wrote: "Here are the sheets of the last part, and welcome! There is nothing more to be done about the paper of Mme. Blanc's, thank you!" (Houghton Library, Harvard) "About French Children," by Th. Bentzon, illustrated by Maurice Boutet de Monvel, appeared in the Century, LII (October 1896), 803-822.
     2 Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) was co-editor of North American Review from 1863 to 1868, professor of literature and the history of fine arts at Harvard University, translator of Dante, and editor of George William Curtis' Orations and Addresses (New York, 1894), 3 vols. Miss Jewett often visited Norton and his daughters at Shady Hill, their Cambridge residence, as well as at Ashfield, their summer home.
     Johnson did not respond to Miss Jewett's suggestion but the address received publication in the Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, August 13, 1896, and in Norton's privately printed Memorials to Two Friends, James Russell Lowell: 1819-1891, George William Curtis: 1824-1892 (New York, 1902).
     3 George William Curtis (1824-1892), author, orator, and adviser to Presidents, was editor of Harper's Weekly from 1863 to 1892. Curtis also maintained a summer home in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and took active interest in local affairs. In the Ashfield Town Hall is a bronze tablet to his memory. The installation ceremony was held on Wednesday, August 12, 1896.


81 FREDERICK M. HOPKINS

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 29, 1896

    My dear Mr. Hopkins:

     I thank you for your kindness in sending me the Review of Reviews for December, and for all your friendliness in regard to the Pointed Firs.1 I am sure that you will like to know that it is doing capitally well as to sales.
     I think very well of your suggestion in regard to Mrs. Thaxter's Among the Isles of Shoals.2 I mean to speak to Mr. Mifflin3 about it at once, and I should be very glad if you would tell him what you think about the matter. The House will soon settle upon next year's plans and some things are of course already under weigh.
     With my best thanks and best New Year wishes.
     Yours very sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     I have in mind Mr. J. Appleton Brown and Mr. Ross Turner4 for the illustrators, for they both know the Islands so well -- are charming artists, especially Mr. Brown, and were Mrs. Thaxter's intimate friends.

     NOTES
     1 Hamilton W. Mabie's brief but laudatory critique of The Country of the Pointed Firs ("shows her true and delicate art in all its quiet and enduring charm") and a bust portrait of Miss Jewett appeared in the year-end review of worthy books in Review of Reviews, XIV(December 1896), 743.
    2 Celia Thaxter wrote this book (Boston, 1873) upon Whittier's insistence that she put into print her engaging anecdotes and impressions of the scenes and natives of these seaweed-encircled islands.
     3 George Harrison Mifflin (1845-1921), senior partner and, later, president of Houghton Mifflin Company. His major functions were to make policy and deal with the more important authors.
     4 Ross Sterling Turner (1847-1915) was a teacher of water color at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Normal Art School, with studios in Boston and Salem from 1882 to the year of his death. Mrs. Thaxter took lessons from him during the winters when she lived in Boston and arranged for him to come to the Isles of Shoals in the summer. She became fond of the young man, called him her "grandson," and attended music concerts with him. After he married, he built a studio on Appledore Island near Mrs. Thaxter's cottage.


82 SARA NORTON
     Sara Norton (1864-1922), daughter of Charles Eliot Norton and niece of James Russell Lowell. Miss Norton consorted with Miss Jewett both at Cambridge and South Berwick. With M. A. DeWolfe Howe, she edited Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (Boston, 1913), 2 vols.

     34 Beacon Street
     Boston
     Monday morning
     [January 4, 1897]

    My dear Sally:

     I have had a letter from Mrs. Warner1 in which she proposes next week for our visit -- Tuesday (12th), Wednesday and Thursday -- or the same days the week after. Should you like to go next week, which seems best for me? I suppose that Mrs. Warner will like to know as early as possible but I think that we can have a word about it on Wednesday when I hope to see you.
     Yours most affectionately,
     S. O. Jewett
      NOTE
     1 Mrs. Charles Dudley Warner (1834-1921) was a leader in the intellectual life of Hartford, Connecticut, with a major interest in music. A brilliant concert pianist, she helped organize and played with the Hartford Philharmonic Orchestra. Her home, like Mrs. Fields's, was a magnet for lovers of art, literature, and music.


83 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     The Homestead Hotel
     Hot Springs, Virginia
     March 18, [1897]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I have just been reading a most delightful short essay in the United Service Magazine for January,1 a magazine which I never saw before, and it seemed to me that I must write to you and Mr. Page2 and ask you to look out for the writer of "Society in Washington," and some day give him a chance in our Atlantic. Ido not know him and I do not think that I ever read anything of his before, but he says such first rate things in this little paper and the 'atmosphere' is so fine. I believe that he is the son in-law of Richard M. Hunt, but I do not feel quite sure.3
     Mrs. Fields and I had been talking about M. Brunetière4 of the Revue des Deux Mondes and his coming, and I was wishing that he would write an essay on "The Canons of Literary Taste," but as I finished this Washington paper I said to her that I should like to know what Mr. Hunt would say on "A Standard of Manners." You see that I expect great things from a writer whom I have met only once! But Mr. Hunt says things on his fifth page that are very unusual, and the value he puts upon American life and behavior in our most cosmopolitan city is very discerning in its decisions.
     You will be glad to know that Mrs. Fields is better after having more than one drawback on the road to health. She really begins to look like herself again. She would send you her very kind regards -- I am sure -- with mine.
     Yours most truly,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     I am delighted to hear everyone who speaks of the Atlantic say such good things!

     NOTES
     1 Livingston Hunt, "Society in Washington," United Service, XVII (January 1897), 1-7.Miss Jewett erroneously refers to the United Service Magazine; though both were journals of military and naval affairs, the former was published in Philadelphia, the latter in London.
     2 Walter Hines Page (1855-1918) was assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896,editor from 1898 to 1899, and wartime United States ambassador to Great Britain.
     3 Miss Jewett inserted "in-law" between lines and crossed out "but I do not feel quite sure." Her confusion is understandable, for Livingston Hunt (1859-1943),a naval officer, married another Hunt -- Catherine Howland, daughter of Richard Morris Hunt, the American architect.
     4 Ferdinand Brunetière (1849-1906), French critic who applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literary history, was successively contributor, secretary, sub-editor, and editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1877 to 1906. Invited to deliver a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities, Brunetière arrived in the United States on March 21, 1897, accompanied by his wife and Madame Blanc. On May 8 the Brunetières sailed for France, leaving Madame Blanc here to visit with Miss Jewett and other American friends.


84 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     April 27, 1897

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I thank you for your Easter letter as I have already thanked you many times in my heart, but never with my pen until now because I have been ill. I shall not forget your kindness nor the words that you said: they came to me in a moment when I needed them very much.1
     One can never really know one's friends until they come and stand by. These sad spring days have been full of the sunshine of friendliness to me, after all. While one always seems to begin a new life in company with the soul that disappears into 'the world of light,' -- that goes away only to come nearer to one's heart than ever before. It all seems like a transfiguration of the old way of loving, and of friendship too.
     My nephew2 is such a dear boy of seventeen and he has been the greatest comfort to his aunt Mary and me. Last week he was here for his Easter vacation and he found it harder to be cheerful in the last days than in the earlier ones, for I can see that he begins to understand what a change has fallen upon his life and ours, and what a new relationship to heavenly things. He was too young when his father died, five years ago, to feel or understand what is pretty clear to him now.
     I think of your Sylvia and her little sister as I write; dear friends they must be, without knowing it, and the little one the elder and wiser of the two.3 We are so unconscious of the unseen side of our lives except at these great moments of revelation, and I thank you from my heart for letting me share in the light that shone for you at Easter.
     With my sister's kindest remembrance,
     Yours ever, affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Miss Jewett's younger sister, Mrs. Caroline Augusta Eastman, died April 1, 1897.
    2 Dr. Theodore Jewett Eastman, last of the direct line of descendants, was the son of Caroline and Edwin C. Eastman (see Genealogical Chart). Miss Jewett dedicated The Tory Lover "To T. J. E."
     3 Sylvia Scudder's twin sister was delicate and lived only about a year and a half. Miss Jewett clung to the meta-physical belief that despite corporeal separation at death, souls continue to communicate across the void with those who love them.


85 HENRY GREEN
     Elder Henry Green (1844-1931) joined the Shaker colony at Alfred, Maine, in 1858, and later became its spiritual and business leader. He was a man of jovial temperament, an intense reader, and an exquisite artisan in wood.

     South Berwick, Maine
     Tuesday
     June 8, [1897]

    Dear Elder Henry:

     You have been so kind as to say that you would let me come again some time to visit the Family,1 and I write to ask if you could conveniently entertain me for a day and night now? I have a friend staying with me -- a French lady: Madame Blanc -- who has a great desire to visit one of your societies, if only for the sake of a very dear friend of hers, Miss Wild (also a French woman), who spent a year long ago at Mt. Lebanon2 and who was a friend of Elder Frederick Evans and some of the people of that time. Madame Blanc would like very much to see your Sunday worship if it were possible, and for that reason, if we come, I think we had better spend Saturday night and part of Sunday. You will find Madame Blanc sincerely interested and reverent. I think you would all enjoy seeing her very much. She speaks English very well.
     Will you be so kind as to send me a word as soon as you can so that I may make other plans in case this is inconvenient for you at this time.
     With kind regards to all the Family and remembering my former visit with pleasure,
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 The Shaker "family" was then comprised of from thirty to eighty individuals.
     2 In 1747 two English Quakers, James Wardley and his wife Jane, separated from the orthodox Quaker faith and formed "The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing." In 1774 Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate Englishwoman who believed that she was Christ reincarnated, emigrated to America with eight of these "Shaking Quakers," and in 1787 established the first Shaker colony at Mount Lebanon, New York. By 1794 some dozen colonies were firmly entrenched in New England. The settlement at Alfred, Maine, took root at this time, became a large and prosperous communistic society by 1875, but by reason of declining numbers (one of the original tenets of Shakerism is celibacy) was abandoned in 1925. The Shakers were devoted to pacifism, sobriety, artistry, industry, and good works.


86 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     June 9, 1897

    My dear Friend:

     How very kind of you to send me your story!1 I am so sure of finding real delight in it that I write you before I have read it and send that note flying off with all my thanks. I have been at Manchester to help to begin the summer housekeeping there, and Annie and I were delighted with the coming of your book of exquisite poetry2 on her birthday. I never had seen the poem of the old woman singing,3 and it went to my heart. Wasn't it strange that each of us, you and I should have had the pathos of that so near to our hearts at the same time. I tried to make people feel it in my Pointed Firs page where old Mrs. Blackett sang, 4 but I should like to borrow your words and be sure that they were read!
     Annie is hoping that you will come over to Thunderbolt Hill5 when my dear French friend Madame Blanc and I get back. Just now we are here keeping the old house together and looking at the green fields with the eager delight of children. I have given her some sweet fern and some bayberry and some checkerberry leaves, and so now she knows New England. It is good to have the real pleasure of her being here for this has been a sad spring to me with the sudden death of my younger sister in April. The world seems much changed by that going.
     Goodbye, dear friend, from your sincere and affectionate
     S. O. Jewett
     Please give my best remembrance to your household, and especially the little niece whom I look for in the train but do not see half as often as I wish.6

      NOTES
     1 "A Guardian Angel," Harper's, XCIV (May 1897), 941-956.
    2In Titian's Garden and Other Poems (Boston, 1897).
    3 "On An Old Woman Singing," page 46.
    4 Almiry Todd's cordial and indomitable mother, mistress of Green Island, was "one of them spry, light-footed women" at eighty-six. In Chapter 11 she joins her son William in a duet of sentimental Scotch and English songs, "missing only the higher notes."
     5 Site of Mrs. Fields's summer cottage in Manchester-by-the-Sea (see Letter 131, note 7).
     6 Miss Jewett's fondness for children emerges throughout her letters. Miss Elizabeth Hayes Goodwin, now resident hostess of the Jewett Memorial House at South Berwick, recalls that as a small child she had to pass Miss Jewett's home on her way to Miss Olive Raynes's school and was frequently invited in for breakfast. She remembers particularly Miss Jewett's gracious interest and her succulent orange marmalade. Even more memorable were Miss Jewett's notes of excuse for lateness and the delicate quandary they evoked for the teacher each time. Strictly considered, Miss Jewett was not a parent, but, after all, she was Miss Jewett!


87 IRVING B. MOWER
     Reverend Irving Bemis Mower (1856-1929), minister of the South Berwick Baptist Church from 1893 to 1903, was an honorary graduate and trustee of Colby College, and for many years Secretary of the United Baptist Convention.

     Monday morning
     [June 14, 1897]

    My dear Mr. Mower:

     I thank you very much for your kind note and for your beautiful piece of quartz which I shall treasure very much, especially if you would consent to lend it to me! I cannot quite bear to rob your collection of such a fine thing or to rob you of your pleasant associations with it. A collector has a peculiar affection for such treasures, as I very well know.1 This shall live on my desk as long as my conscience will let it and perhaps a little longer, and I shall never see it without remembering the kind thought that sent it there. Believe me, I appreciate your goodness very much!
     With my best wishes, I am
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 Collecting interesting rock specimens was Reverend Mower's hobby; he took frequent field trips in this pursuit. The Maine geological exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 was prepared by him.


88 HENRY GREEN

     Monday morning
     [June 14, 1897]

    Dear Elder Henry:

     Madame Blanc and I hope to take the morning train for Alfred tomorrow by Rochester. I am sorry that I could not manage to come today, and we were much disappointed at having to give up our plan for Sunday.1 I think that we had better stay overnight if it is convenient for you, but I hope that you and the good sisters2 will not make yourselves any extra trouble for us.
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 On Tuesday morning began a torrential rain which continued for several days, washing away the railroad embankment and leaving the northern end of the bridge without support. When the cloudburst subsided, Miss Jewett and her French guest attempted to drive the twenty miles to Alfred by horse and carriage but soon realized the impracticality of their plan. They had to wait until the railroad bridge had been repaired before entraining, and then had to be satisfied with the long detour by way of Rochester, New Hampshire.
     For a detailed account of this visit to Alfred see Th. Bentzon, "Le Communisme en Amérique," Revue des Deux Mondes, CXLIV(November 15, 1897), 300-335, of which one section is subtitled, "Une Visite chez les Shakers"; also Carl J. Weber, "New England Through French Eyes Fifty Years Ago," New England Quarterly, XX (September 1947), 385-396.
    2 In her article Madame Blanc cites two of the exceptionally gracious sisters: Eldress Lucinda and Eldress Harriet [N. Coolbroth], who "is related to Stonewall Jackson."



89 HENRY GREEN

     South Berwick, Maine
     June 19, 1897

    Dear Elder Henry:

     I thank you for your kind note. I thought that I should like to leave the small present for your library, if only to show something of my appreciation of the kindness and true hospitality that everyone showed to us. Madame Blanc and I send our love and best wishes to you all. She speaks often of the pleasure of her visit and especially of her talks with Eldress Harriet, but indeed we remember you all with sincere interest and affection.1
     I thank you for your invitation to come with my sister and beg you to believe me
     Most truly your obliged friend,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 Madame Blanc reports in her Revue article that Miss Jewett talked with Elder Henry about the improvement in the Shaker schools and about "the celebrated novelist Howells, who had painted a Shaker village in one of his finest books, The Undiscovered Country." In the evening Elder Henry asked Miss Jewett to tell about her voyage to the Antilles (see Letter 78, note 3), and "she delivered her account with a good deal of verve. The Shaker women were keenly interested."


90 FREDERICK M. HOPKINS

     South Berwick, Maine
     September 22, [1897]

    Dear Mr. Hopkins:

     I am sorry that your note has been so long overlooked and unanswered.
     I do not go to town -- Boston -- until very late in the season and I shall be here through the autumn busy with writing for the magazines. You will have seen a story in the Anniversary number of the Atlantic Monthly just published.1
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett
     I thank you very much for your kindness in sending me the Review of Reviews.2

      NOTES
     1 "Martha's Lady," Atlantic Monthly, LXXX (October 1897), 523-533; collected in The Queen's Twin. The article "Forty Years of The Atlantic Monthly" on pages 571-576 of this issue included the name of Sarah Orne Jewett as one of "the long list of notable women" who had written for the magazine during that period.
     2 Review of Reviews, XV(June 1897), 694-695. contained an account of Brunetière's visit to the United States, with incidental comments on Madame Blanc which Hopkins knew would be of interest to Miss Jewett.



91 MARIE THÉRÈSE BLANC
     Marie Thérèse de Solms Blanc (1840-1907), used the nom de plume "Th. Bentzon" derived from her grandfather Benjamin de Bentzon, a governor of the Danish Antilles. Author of some thirty novels, three of which received the accolade of the Académie Française, Madame Blanc achieved additional reputation through her literary criticism of American authors and her interpretation of American customs to the French people. She visited America twice, wrote fluently of her impressions and experiences, and translated Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Aldrich, and Miss Jewett. The two women corresponded for eight years before they met for the first time in Paris in 1892 (see Fields, Letters, 91). In 1893 Madame Blanc stayed at Mrs. Fields's Boston home, and in 1897 at Miss Jewett's in South Berwick. In 1898 Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett spent several weeks at Madame Blanc's country home in La Ferté sous Jouarre.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     December 1, [1897]

    Dearest Thérèse:

     I have come to town for a few days and I find the Revue with your beautiful paper.1 I cannot tell you with what joy and delight I have read it -- all those hours live again for me and shine more than ever with a lovely light from the sun of our friendship. But oh how I wish to see you! You have done this piece of work in quite a wonderful way, 'mon cher maitre.' I suppose that I appreciate your great gift better for knowing so well the material upon which it now spends itself.
     I have only time to say this and to send my note flying to the post to catch this steamer. Annie is very well and town very busy. At home our friends have come to the lonely house. It begins to seem long since I heard from you.
     With dearest pride in your work and love for you,
     S.O.J.

     NOTE
     1 "Le Communisme en Amérique," Revue des Deux Mondes, CXLIV (November 15, 1897), 300-335, one section of which describes the visit made by Miss Jewett and Madame Blanc to the Shaker Colony in Alfred, Maine (see Letter 88, note 1).



92 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     December 19, [1897]
     Dear Mr. Johnson:

     I am very late in sending you my best thanks for your new book of poems,1 but just as I came up to Town and found it, Mrs. Fields fell ill, and I have put by almost all my letters, and turned to reading aloud to a poor dear person who was commanded by her doctor to listen and not to talk. And you know very well how fast the winter days can fly when one is living a good deal in an invalid room. I am glad to say that Mrs. Fields is much better. I do not know whether she had written you her thanks for the Songs ofLiberty, but I shall say again how affectionately she really did thank you!
     I find that "The Wistful Days" is my favorite; I care very much about it, and just as it spoke to me at first, so, as I think about all the poems, it shines brightest to me now. I cannot exactly say why I care more for it than any poem I ever read of yours, but the fact remains that I do, and so I will not stop to hunt for reasons.
     I hope that you and Mistress Katharine are beginning the winter well -- the last I really heard about you was in France. My last letters from Madame Blanc have been very cheerful.
     Goodbye, with kindest wishes for a happy Christmas from your sincere friend
     Sarah O. Jewett
     Mrs. Fields's book about Mrs. Stowe2 is having really a great success and brings her much pleasure, especially just now. I am sure that you will care about it.
 
 

     NOTES
     1Songs of Liberty and Other Poems (New York, 1897).
    2 Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston, 1897). Mrs. Fields's other excursions into biography included lives of her husband James T. Fields, of Charles Dudley Warner, Hawthorne, and Whittier.


93 HENRY GREEN

     Boston
     December 31, 1898 [1897]1

    Dear Elder Henry:

     I thank you for your kind letter and kind present of your interesting book. I was sure that you would all like to read Mrs. Fields's Life of Mrs. Stowe, but it is very pleasant to have such appreciative words and I could not fail to let the author share them.
     I have hoped to be able to send you a copy of the French review in which Madame Blanc gave some reminiscences of our visit to your Family with some very sympathetic accounts of the Shaker belief and history. She was helped by the pamphlets and especially by the information which you and Eldress Harriet, Eldress Lucinda and others were so kind to give her, and speaks very warmly of her experiences. Of course a foreigner may make mistakes easily, and often uses a word in quite another sense from our sense of it, but I am sure that you will find much to enjoy. I thought that I could get some spare copies easily (I borrowed the copy which I read) but it seems that the review is only sent to its regular subscribers in America. I have sent to France for one for you which is likely to be here sometime next month. If you are near one of the large libraries you will find the paper in the Revue des Deux Mondes for Oct'r 15th. I think that it would be interesting to have some passages, at least, translated and reprinted in one of your magazines. Madame Blanc writes me that she has had a great many letters about the paper and that it has seemed to interest many readers in France. She knows that I always see a friend's copy and I suppose thinks that we could easily get other copies here, or she would have sent over one. You will understand how her account of our visit made me live it over again, but I have always remembered it with great pleasure.
     Please remember me most affectionately to all my kind friends. I hope indeed to come again as you kindly invite me, with my sister.
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 It is probable that Miss Jewett dated this letter incorrectly, anticipating the year which was to begin next day. Mrs. Fields's book was published in November 1897and would have been of topical interest in December 1897. Similarly Madame Blanc's essay, "Le Communisme en Amérique," which appeared November (not October) 15, 1897.



94 HENRY GREEN

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     January 26, [1898]

    Dear Elder Henry:

     I return the letter of Madame de Boffle.1 As you say, you must have her answer in regard to the price of the cloak which she quite misunderstands, and by that time I can tell you whether the friends of Madame Blanc will be going over to France, which is not yet decided.
     I do not wonder that you were confused by hearing of Mrs. Bentzon! but Madame Blanc is almost better known as Th. (or Thérèse) Bentzon, which is her writing name as George Eliot was the writing name of Mrs. Lewes.2 Only in this case Bentzon was a family name to which our friend had a right. And she is usually called Madame Blanc-Bentzon, though here in America where double names are not so common as in Europe she was usually called plain Madame Blanc. She was born Thérèse de Solms, daughter of Count de Solms -- but I must not confuse you with any more French names.3
     I had a very kind letter from dear Eldress Harriet not long ago, which I answered.
     You may be sure that anything which comes to you from France by the way of Madame Blanc will be all right. She has no doubt set the fashion for Shaker cloaks -- she was so much pleased with her own, which I thought much the prettiest one I have ever seen.
     Please remember me affectionately to all my friends, and write whenever you think I can make things clearer or help you in any way.
     Yours very truly,
     S. O. Jewett
      I should think, in case of further orders, that it might be as well to send by express. There is little trouble with the customs in France, I believe, and it is quicker than waiting for chance travellers.4

     NOTES
     1 Evidently a French lady who so admired the Shaker cloak Madame Blanc purchased on her 1897visit to the Alfred colony that she wrote directly to Elder Henry to order one for herself. The dress of the Shaker women is described in detail by Madame Blanc in the Revue des Deux Mondes article of November 15, 1897.
    2 Miss Jewett seems unaware that George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) did not contract a legal marriage with George Henry Lewes.
     3 Bentzon was her mother's maiden name. She abbreviated her first name to give the impression of a masculine equivalent -- Thomas or Théodor.
     4 Later in this year Miss Jewett embarked on her third voyage to Europe with Mrs. Fields. She was joined by her sister Mary and her nephew in France, met Violet Paget, stayed with Madame Blanc for about a month at her country house, then went on to England, where she encountered Rudyard Kipling and Henry James.


95 HAMILTON B. HOLT
     Hamilton B. Holt (1872-1951) was successively office editor and managing editor of the Independent from 1897 to 1913, and editor from 1914 to 1920. In 1925 he was elected president of Rollins College.

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     April 7, [1898]

    Dear Mr. Holt:

     My price to the magazines for a story of the length you mention is so much larger than the price the Independent pays that I fear you would not think it worthwhile to consider a new story. I sent one last year, but I confess that my only reason for doing it was because my dear friend Miss Ward had asked me and I was only too glad to think that I could do something that was in any sense for her! This is a most unbusiness-like confession but I am sure that you can understand.1
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
    1 Across the top of the first page, in heavy green crayon, is written: "How much was she pd. before and how long a story?" At the end of the letter, in black pencil: "7 1/4 columns old form $75.00. C. H. W." Miss Jewett's "The First Sunday in June," Independent, XLIX(November 4, 1897), 1446-1447, is seven and a half columns long.



96 MARY E. MULHOLLAND
     Mary E. Mulholland was born and grew up in Bay City, Michigan. Her mother, a native of Belfast, Maine, was an enthusiast of Miss Jewett's work and early brought it to her daughter's attention. Miss Mulholland became acquainted with Maine at the age of three, vacationed there often, later purchased a cottage at Ash Point and spent every summer there.

 

     148 Charles Street, Boston
     January 23, 1899

     My dear friend:

     I thank you sincerely for your most kind letter, and I wish to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to know that you like my stories, and especially that you are such a friend of Miss Betty Leicester!1 I must own that I took a great liking to her myself when I was writing her, and that she has always seemed to me to be a real person. And it is just the same way with Mrs. Todd.2
     I cannot tell you just where Dunnet Landing is except that it must be somewhere 'along shore' between the region of Tenants Harbor and Boothbay, or it might be farther to the eastward in a country that I know less well. It is not any real 'landing' or real 'harbor'3 but I am glad to think that you also know that beautiful stretch of seacoast country, and so we can feel when we think about it, as if we were neighbours. If you ever read the Atlantic Monthly magazine you will find a new chapter about Mrs. Todd and one of her friends in this new February number,4 and I hope that you will like it.
     I am sure that you must like a great many other books since you like these stories of mine. And I am so glad, because you will always have the happiness of finding friendships in books, and it grows pleasanter and pleasanter as one grows older. And then the people in books are apt to make us understand 'real' people better, and to know why they do things, and so we learn sympathy and patience and enthusiasm for those we live with, and can try to help them in what they are doing, instead of being half suspicious and finding fault. It is just the same way that a beautiful picture makes us quicker to see the same things in a landscape, to look for rich clouds and trees, and see their beauty.
     I wonder if you like Miss Thackeray's beautiful stories5 as much as I do, but I am sure you will a little later if you do not know them now.
     Good-bye, dear Mary, I send you many thanks for your letter and my kindest wishes. I hope that you will be as busy and as happy as can be and never be without plenty of friends -- in books and out of them.
     Yours affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Miss Mulholland was thirteen years old when she wrote to Miss Jewett about her love for Betty Leicester, A Story for Girls. She had received the book in 1890, and it had been read aloud to her until she was able to read herself.
     2 The ample landlady, artful herbalist, canny mariner, and bucolic philosopher of Dunnet Landing in The Country of the Pointed Firs.
    3 Miss Jewett always eluded precise placement of her fictional locales (see Letters 8,note 4; 30).
    4 In "The Queen's Twin," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIII (February 1899), 235-246; collected in The Queen's Twin and Other Stories, Almiry Todd takes the narrator on a visit to Mrs. Abby Martin, who has made a fetish of her affinity with Queen Victoria.
     5 Lady Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, concentrated upon fiction for children before 1887, then gradually turned to biography and criticism. It was on her first trip to Europe (May-October 1882) that Miss Jewett met Lady Ritchie, whose art she invariably described with highest regard (see Fields, Letters, 192).


97 ELIZABETH J. GILMAN
     Elizabeth Jervis Gilman (1856-1939), daughter of Charles and Alice Gilman of Brunswick, Maine, was a gentlewoman and meticulous housekeeper. After the death of her parents, she took over the management of the Gilman menage and provided a more than adequate home for her sister and two brothers.

     South Berwick, Maine
     Saturday
     [April 22, 1899]

     Dear Lizzie:

     You can't think how I am enjoying the butternuts! I have had a great feast, especially the day after they came -- Wednesday morning -- when I was busy in the garden and kept a deposit with a useful hammer on the stone carriage-block where I returned every little while to crack a few and enjoy a season of rest!! Gardening takes hold of a person in the early days of the season, and I wish that I could always have butternuts to see me through! You were so kind to remember my love for them, and I thank you very much.
     I have meant to write each day but I have been out of doors more than usual and Theodore is at home this week for his vacation, and has his friend Russell Greeley with him.1 They go back tomorrow and are enjoying every minute, it seems to me. Everybody belonging to this family looks a little sunburnt.
     We are so glad to have a card from dear Cousin Alice now and then; the water2 is a blessing at any rate, but I bless it beside for bringing us a word from her. It makes me so happy to think that she feels a little stronger this spring, but don't let her do too much in the garden (unless you have saved out a few butternuts to stay her; I do find them so efficacious!). We are not doing anything very new this year but you know, Cousin Alice knows, that there are always gaps to fill, and transplantings to do after the long winter. Mary is very well and busy. We mean to spend a few days in Boston next week.
     With my thanks again, dear Liddy, and love to you and all the family, especially your mother, I am
     Your very affectionate cousin,
     Sarah

     NOTES
     1 Russell Hubbard Greeley, a classmate at Harvard College.
     2 Paradise Spring Water (see Letter 66, note 2).


98 JOHN THAXTER
     John Thaxter (1854-1929), son of Celia Thaxter, worked Champernowne Farm, the family home at Kittery Point, Maine. Miss Jewett visited his mother during her short stays here en route to Appledore Island, and after Mrs. Thaxter's death John maintained his ties with Miss Jewett via the trolley line then extant between Kittery Point and South Berwick. He wrote diligently and prolifically but failed to achieve publication except for minutiae in local newspapers.

     South Berwick, Maine
     June 5, 1899

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I shall take great pleasure in reading your story and in helping you in any way that I can about it. I don't hesitate to say, however, that from long experience I have only got a more complete assurance that 'pulls' do not count: a good story is its own best pull!
     Please let me have the manuscript as soon as you can. It will come in just the right time for I am in the last week or two of idleness after a long illness, and presently I must turn to my own writing again.
     With kindest remembrance to you and your wife,1 believe me ever
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 In 1887 Thaxter married Mary Gertrude Stoddard (1858-1951) of Worcester, Massachusetts, mistress of the house at the time of this letter.


99 JOHN THAXTER

     Manchester, Massachusetts
     June 11, [1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     Your note and the story reached me here, and I have been eager to write you sooner but I was prevented yesterday. I wish that we could have a long talk for there are many things that I should find it much easier to say than to write. I think that the story has many fine qualities but it seems to me to fail in construction. You introduce your characters in an interesting way always, but there are too many of them for the length of the story and, if I may speak plainly, too many starts which do not come to sufficient importance. There is the really delightful, spirited beginning in which you make one deeply interested in the old house, the Doctor and his family, and the Scotch dependents, (your landscape and especially your descriptions are beautifully done) but afterward you keep making new claims upon the reader's attention and interest: there is the castaway and his mysterious history, then his relation to the little girl; then one must follow her career; then his as an inventor; then there are divergences into his past history etc., from all of which one expects more satisfaction, or some final results, and at the last you do not completely relate his shadowed fame, and his record as Deserter, to the story, that is, you bring it in too lightly and casually -- I do not like the letter being lost!! And the whole sketch is confused and bewildering and even improbable, as if one saw a beautiful, quiet piece of landscape painting with its figures hastily done, and crowded and even puzzling to the eye. I cannot praise enough the pictures of nature, the keen observation of sea and shore. I think that you have tried to do a very difficult thing in your plot, and that it would be a great wonder if you had quite succeeded.
     I wish that you would try something that does not aim so much at incidents. Take a simpler history of life: that very doctor who goes to help some lonely neighbour, and finds himself close to one of the tragedies or comedies of rustic life. Try to give his own life with its disappointments, his growth of sympathy etc in that lonely place. You could make a series of short sketches of him and his casual patients, his walks or rides to the lonely farms and homes along shore in winter nights and summer dawns, and find yourself following out his character in interesting ways. Just write things that you know and have done.
     This piece of work interests me a good deal. I find such an interesting inheritance in it here and there of some of your mother's gifts of saying things, and I also find things that are wholly your own and which make me urge you to go on.
     I think that you could easily get this story printed, but not in just the places where I should like to have you start, and besides there is too much really good material to make light of. I somehow wish to simplify it, to have you think about it again and see if you agree with what I have said. And don't go to work at it for some time, but try what you can do with the doctor -- defeated, invalided, isolated in the strange old house. Write some real thing about his being knocked for some summer night and going to see a patient, and coming home again. Don't write a 'story' but just tell the thing! I am afraid that I am disappointing you, but I know you will like it best if I write frankly.1
     Mrs. Fields is not here just now, but I know she would wish to have me send a very kind message to you. We were both much pained to hear of your uncle Cedric's death. I think of your uncle Oscar a great deal.2
     Believe me ever
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 No copy of this story survived among his manuscripts. It is noteworthy that Miss Jewett's remarks in these letters to Thaxter add up to a declaration of her own principles of composition for the short story and a remarkably close reflection of her own practices.
     2 Cedric Laighton (1840-1899) and Oscar Laighton (1839-1939) were brothers of Celia Thaxter. They managed the Appledore House, a resort hotel on the Isles of Shoals ten miles off the Maine coast. Some of the guests over the years included Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, Aldrich, Mrs. Stowe, and Miss Jewett, as well as many eminences from the worlds of art, music, theatre, science, and the university.


100 JOHN THAXTER

     Pride's Crossing1
     Beverly, Massachusetts
     July 29, [1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I am sorry to have kept your story so long, but I could not somehow get the right moment for a last reading, and to write to you. I have been moving about, and I have had to think much of other things.
     Yet I have thought much of this piece of work which on the whole I like much better than the other. It is better worked out and more sincerely felt. I find myself always thinking of it as "The Heart of Abijah" -- and you have certainly given a most touching picture of a true and dependent affection. It is most genuine and real. The one thing that I question is the episode of the new teeth: one cannot have a chance to smile in just that way at poor Abijah or to let him be even the least bit shocking to one's sense of good taste. You have written all the rest in such a different key, and keep your reader in a different atmosphere, and so I think the very truth of it strikes a wrong note of 'realism.'
     I think that one of the weekly magazines like the Independent of New York or the Outlook might like to print it. I have a great liking also for our good story-paper in Portland, the Portland Transcript. You may think that I am not choosing the best places, but I think that a sketch like this with all its good qualities does not exactly belong to the magazines as it is. I want you to print it, for I think nothing helps a writer like seeing his work in print. And I sincerely hope that you will go on and write more.
     With very kind regards to Mrs. Thaxter,
     Yours ever most truly,
     S. O. Jewett
     I think when the writer speaks of the hero, he should usually write his name in full -- leaving 'Bije' to be spoken by the characters.
     On p.12: I think that 'Bije' would not have been kept from going to the grave by the doctor's order, unless you had explained before that he was ill when he died, 'or something.' It would be the one thing that he insisted upon, it seems to me.

     NOTE
     1 Site of Susan Burley Cabot's summer home, which had a separate post-office but was a part of Beverly. Miss Jewett spent a period each summer with her friend, who, though an invalid confined to bed, made the days interesting with conversation and the evenings lively with backgammon. Miss Jewett was totally at home with Mrs. Cabot, considering her house "unlike any other, with a sense of space and time and uninterruptedness." (Fields, Letters, 124.)



101 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN
 

     Pride's Crossing
     Beverly, Massachusetts
     July 31, [1899]

    Dear Cousin Alice:

     I meant to write to you before I came away to tell you how much I enjoyed my dear day with you, and so did Theodore too. I had been wishing so much to see you, and I always love to take a look at Brunswick, which is always full of delightful associations for me. You made it seem pleasanter than ever with your kind welcome, not only you but all the family, and it was a great delight to see you all again and the old house, and to have a look at the garden.
     We came home easily, getting to Salmon Falls before seven, and found John waiting for us. I was much applauded by Mary for coming back so much better than I had gone away. Theodore went off again in a few days to make a week's cruise along the shore with one of his friends, and I left just before he got back to come here to make a little visit to my old friend Mrs. Cabot, and today I am going to Mrs. Fields's, and then home again at the last of the week. Only think, Theodore will be twenty years old on Friday! I can't believe it -- time does fly so fast. He said ever so many times how much he enjoyed his day in Brunswick, especially the good talks with Cousin Charles (I think it would be hard to tell any difference in their ages!!).
     You can't think how glad I was to see Mrs. Rollins1 again, as she had come home from her long winter away while I was at Mouse Island.2 She looks as well and bright as can be, and it is so pleasant to have her house open again. She was glad to hear about you and Lizzie and Mary.3 Indeed, all of your friends were, and I have told them that I hope you are coming for a nice visit before cold weather. You know there is always a warm welcome waiting for all of you. Good-bye, with love to all, from your affectionate
     Sarah
     I wish so much to know if you got off to Bailey's Island.4 Cousin Fanny will be coming and you musn't put it off too long, for it does you so much good.
 

     NOTES
    1Ellen Augusta Lord Rollins (1835-1922) lived at Main and Young streets in South Berwick, within sight of Miss Jewett's home.
     2 A wooded, twenty-acre island in Boothbay Harbor, famed in these days for its mineral spring and summer resort hotel, the Samoset House. A decade before this letter was written, Alice Longfellow -- an annual sojourner -- introduced Miss Jewett to the island's charms. Miss Jewett often revisited Miss Longfellow and tried to keep up with her strenuous sessions of rowing and sailing.
     3 Mary Gardiner Gilman (1865-1940), younger sister of Elizabeth, became Town Librarian and occupied the position for forty-seven years. Secretary of the Pejepscot Historical Society, she was an acknowledged authority on the city of Brunswick and Cumberland County.
     4 Bailey Island is just south of Orr's Island in Casco Bay, off the coast of Brunswick.


102 JOHN THAXTER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     August 7, [1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I think that this story is far and away better than the others! You have made it stronger in construction, more direct and interesting in every way. I hope that you will not mind my spoiling the two end pages, but somehow they did not quite follow the others well enough and I have shortened them as you will see, and using your own words most always, I have tried to put them into the 'key' of the first chapter. I think the end -- being such an end -- ought to be as clear and simple as possible, and I even want that reference to the second greatest moment in Jonas's experience to come up (when he broke away from his mother), as if in those last moments his life was moved to its very depths. And I want you to write three or four lines of description for the very end -- that "The doctor, as he went out into the clear light of the early morning, along the little sea-pasture, saw a sea pigeon raising itself from the water and diving, then floating; flapping its white-barred wings as if to try its strength."
     I think that this will link the end of the story to its beautiful beginning. There is no need to say anything about the bird, but just say it was there and let people feel what they like about it. Somehow its presence that first morning and the poor fellow, sense of the bird's freedom and yet its fixed habit of life to that spot, were very striking -- and you can't but like the bird and the man, or do better than repeat yourself. I think that this will make the sketch still more definite and complete. I wonder what name you have in mind -- perhaps "The Life of Jonas?" I think that I should try the Atlantic with this, and if that fails, McClure's Magazine or Harper's.1
     In great haste,
     Most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
 

     NOTE
     1 In all three extant copies of this story Thaxter followed Miss Jewett's promptings to the letter: equating man and nature transcendentally by way of a structural reprise. Notwithstanding, it sold to none of the sources she suggested.



103 HORACE E. SCUDDER
 

     Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.
     Sunday
     August 20, [1899]
 

     Dear Mr. Scudder:

     Madame Blanc-Bentzon has sent me over from Paris the sheets of this book which she has partly written and wholly edited, and which is being taken up with greatest interest in France.1 She and the publishers are eager that there should be an American edition for use in our schools and I run to you who know so much better than I about such things to ask if you think there would be any chance of the use or success of such a thing. It seems to me very French indeed and not according to our scheme of things, but Mrs. Agassiz2 who has been looking it over thought of it more hopefully than I. I like the chapter on "Friendship"3 especially, as she did, but whether it would appeal to girls -- especially American girls! -- remains doubtful, and while the other chapters give good statements of the virtues somehow they do not make many suggestions or link themselves to the development of modern life. But you will really know whether there is any chance of its use as a textbook or manual in any sense, and I should think your opinion so finally valuable and conclusive that I make bold for a friend's sake to ask you for it. I do not wish to carry it to any publishers if there is really no hope.4
     I am just beginning to feel like myself again after a very long illness and still longer process of getting well. I can speak of every elegant attention of the grippe!!Mrs. Fields asks to be most kindly remembered to you and Mrs. Scudder and Sylvia, and so do I. I hoped to see you more than once last winter, but last winter is to be counted out!
     With kindest regards, believe me always
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Causeries de Morale Pratique (Paris, 1899), written in collaboration with Mlle A. Chevalier, was prepared as a "cours de morale à l'usage des jeunes filles."
    2 Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907), second wife and biographer of the naturalist Jean Louis Agassiz, was a member of Mrs. Fields's social coterie. Her vocational interest centered around Harvard's female "Annex," which she helped to establish as Radcliffe College, and which she served as president until 1899.
    3 The twenty-fourth causerie: "L'amitie.-- Devoirs des aims."
    4 In a letter from Chocorua, New Hampshire, dated August 22, 1899, Scudder confirms Miss Jewett's surmise that translating and publishing the book for use in American schools would be impractical and would, in any case, have no vogue here. (Houghton Library, Harvard.)



104 JOHN THAXTER

     Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.
     August 27, 1899

     Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     Mr. Bliss Perry1 (the new editor of the Atlantic) wrote me a day or two [ago] in the course of a letter about other things: "Mr. John Thaxter's story happened to fall into my hands, and I liked his management of the descriptive passages very much. There were other elements too that seemed to me of distinct promise, and I disliked to return the story, though upon the whole I thought it not strongly enough put together to justify publication in the Atlantic."
     I was sorry to find that you had met with a disappointment, but I do think so much frank praise a consolation.
     I have been thinking that you had better send it now to Harper's -- with a personal note to Mr. Henry M. Alden in which I am willing that you should tell him of my advice, and I think that since he was such a warm friend of your mother that he would like to know the work was yours, and to see what you are doing; even if he cannot print it, I think he would be glad to help you about it. It is not that I think these things affect the value of work, especially to the mag. in question, which is what the editors must decide by, but all editors like to watch for new writers.
     With kindest wishes, believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1Bliss Perry (1860-1954), essayist, professor of English literature successively at Princeton and Harvard universities, was editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1899 to 1909. In their rage for culture, Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett once tried to convince him that he ought to reprint in the Atlantic twenty-five to thirty pages each month in French from the Revue des Deux Mondes, a suggestion he smilingly rejected.



105 JOHN THAXTER
     Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.
     [September 1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     Thank you very much for your letter, and especially for the invitation to come to you for a day or two a little later. I keep the pleasantest remembrance of my visit to the farm and I wish that I could see so pleasant a place again but I am almost afraid to make any promise to come this year. I lost so much time through my long illness that I feel very much hurried now that I have had to put by many plans. Perhaps in October or November I may get a day for one of the long drives in which I delight, and so can see you then. I hope that Mrs. Thaxter is having a delightful journey in Canada. Thank you both for wishing that I could come, and believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     I should like dearly to see our sea pigeon, and the little pasture!



106 HENRY GREEN
     Boston
     October 18, [1899]

    Dear Elder Henry:

     Can you send me -- at South Berwick -- ten dollars worth of small fancy articles; pin cushions and little work-cases and a selection of your 'pretty things?' I should like to have them there on Monday next to send to a Fair. I shall not return any, and I shall be responsible for this amount, or I can give the rest elsewhere if any remain unsold. Please do not send anything that will cost much above a dollar.
     It begins to seem a long time since I have seen you or my friends at Alfred. I was glad to hear about you through Eldress Aurelia Mace whom I was glad to 'make friends with' last year at Poland Spring. I have not been there this year as I half expected, but I am glad to say that I am much better than when I saw you last; and fast getting better still, though I am not yet well.
     Please give my kind love to Eldress Lucinda and all the younger sisters who remember my visit to your family -- as I do very often. I hope that another year I can go to Alfred again.
     Believe me always
     Yours most sincerely,
     Sarah O. Jewett


107 JOHN THAXTER

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 23, 1899

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     Thank you for your very kind letter, but I am afraid that I must not promise to accept your invitation. I am very busy these weeks with writing and guests and hurrying off to Town for two or three days at a time. I am well again after so long a pull of illness, but not very strong, and I must put many pleasant things aside.
     I am sorry that your story is not yet placed. I asked Mr. Arthur Stedman1 if he would not undertake the placing of your work and he probably will write to you. A great many writers do all that by means of such an agent now. You have to pay a commission, but they generally get very good prices. He is at the Dewey Building, 5 East 14th Street, New York.
     With my best regards to Mrs. Thaxter.
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     P. S.
     I have felt disappointed that Mr. Alden should not have known about this last story. I think that he was on his vacation when it was sent. Why do not you write him a letter and ask if you may send it again and tell him that it was sent back to you, but that I thought he would like to see it, and would at any rate give you a word of advice. He was a very warm friend of your mother and certain things in the story would interest him doubly, as they did me.
     Try some short sketches of 1500 or 2000 words with a view of the Youth's Companion. And if you get on with them, send them to the Care of Johnson Morton, Esq., Office of the Youth's Companion, Boston. I should think you could make easily some good sketches of fishing or woodcraft or of shooting, if you shoot. They are always longing for such things!! Short!!

     NOTE
     1 Arthur Griffin Stedman (1859-1908), son of Edmund Clarence Stedman, maintained a literary agency in addition to his own literary work. He prepared the biographies for A Library of American Literature, which was jointly edited by his father and Ellen M. Hutchinson in 1892; compiled a volume of selected poems by Whitman; brought out an edition of Melville's Typee; and supervised a series called Fiction, Fact, and Fancy.



108 JOHN THAXTER

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     November 1, [1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I thank you for your kind and delightful letter. We are all three glad to know that you found some pleasure in your little visit because it gave us such real pleasure to see you!
     Indeed I think that your idea of changing Jonas's 'plain name' to "The Sea Pigeon" is excellent!
     I happened to see Mr. Johnson Morton last evening, and I had a good chance to tell him how much interested I am in your work, and he said that he should be glad to talk with you. You must keep in mind the fact that the Y[outh's] C[ompanion] is primarily for 'Youth' not children, but sketches of adventure are always in order. I do not see why he could not use "Blown Off."
     In haste,
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett



109 JOHN THAXTER
     Boston
     [November-December 1899]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     Your letter and the sketch have followed me here, or you should have heard sooner.
     I don't care for this little story as much as for some others -- it reads as if you had rather pushed yourself to the writing of it, and with all its wonderful accuracy of detail, and perfect verity of the old man's speech, it has an artificial quality in its makeup that your best things lack. I think that the melodramatic quality does not go with the material. The old man is so real; the shut up room for so many years does not seem to me to go with his plain living. There might be such a room with the untouched things, but -
     I must not try to write just what I mean. The shipwreck, the drowning; it isn't simple enough, there is too much in it. And then the Doctor who is so familiar with this case of rheumatism -- how is it that he sees the room and above all hears the story for the first time!
     I wish you would try some country talk on a more everyday basis:1 a horse trade reported, a funny bargaining sort of talk; a good story told as some old farmers sit together -- one might overtake the other plodding toward the village (have a bit of landscape) and take him in and hear that he has been cheated in a horse trade or a wagon bought at auction that comes to pieces, and his wife has jeered at him. Call the sketch "A Bad Morning," or something of that sort. All your sense of this talk ought to make something very good. But I must not write longer.
     Yours most truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
    1Thaxter had sent Miss Jewett a story written almost entirely in rustic dialogue, replete with the misspellings dear to unrestrained local colorists. She was looking for the kind of languid localisms she used herself, and which would have given the story unequivocal native resonance.


110 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     December 12, [1899]

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I did not have time to answer your letter in some hurried days at home, but this has given me more time to think the matter of it over, and I am now pretty sure that it would not be wise, poor me, to undertake such a piece of work. I can see that it would be very interesting, but I am full of plans already which I long to be able to carry through, and I have a great reluctance before the thought of turning aside into a new road.1
     When I come to Town to stay for some time (this being but a brief stay), I shall hope to see you.
     I am sending you a copy of The Queen's Twin2 by this same post with many unwritten messages of affectionate remembrance. It begins to seem a great while since you printed "The Shipwrecked Buttons" and "The Girl With the Cannon Dresses" in the Riverside Magazine3 -- in fact, I can't remember when I have thought of their dear young names before!
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Scudder must have prompted her to act on Charles Dudley Warner's suggestion that she write an heroic novel about John Paul Jones's activities in Maine (see Letter 122). Warner admonished her to "Hold the story always in solution in your mind ready to be precipitated when your strength permits. That is to say, even if your fires are banked up, keep the story fused in your mind." (Mrs. James T. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner [New York, 1904], 183-184.) As an editor, he was aware that the vogue of local color was on the wane and that the historical romance was capturing the attention of the American reading public.
     2The Queen's Twin and Other Stories, containing one new and seven collected sketches, with cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman, was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in 1899.
     3 January and August 1870, respectively.


111 HENRY GREEN

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     January 28, [1900]

    Dear Elder Henry:

     I enclose a cheque for $15, for which will you please ask Eldress Fanny to send this week a selection of pretty things about like those that were sent before. Perhaps there might be a few wooden things added, the work-boxes with handles and a closed box or two. Please direct the package to
     Mrs. Henry Parkman1
     30 Commonwealth Avenue
     Boston
and the express shall be paid at this end. I am much interested in a fair here for good objects, and my friends were much pleased with the idea of my getting a box from Alfred.
     With kind love to all my Shaker friends, I am ever
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett
     Please thank Eldress Lucinda for the pleasure I had in her kind Christmas letter.
      NOTE
     1 Mary Frances Parker Parkman (1855-1942), wife of the Boston lawyer and banker, was another of the Jewett-Fields coterie of artistic, literary, musical women who also devoted themselves to philanthropic causes. Mrs. Parkman assisted Sarah Wyman Whitman for many years in conducting these fairs for her adult Bible class at Trinity Church. Miss Jewett visited the Parkmans a number of summers at their home in Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert, Maine.



112 MARIE THÉRÈSE BLANC

     Naples1
     March 18, [1900]

    Dear friend:

     It was such a joy to know that you are again in La Ferté2 and that Marie and Louise are looking after you there! I have been so sadly worried about you all these weeks. I am sure that you will be better now, but I know too well how long one must be in shaking off the fetters of weakness and depression after the influenza. I have hardly even yet got free from my attack of last year. You must not try to push yourself to write, or to go much where people are talking. I long to see you now, and I hope that the weeks will fly fast away until I can get to Paris. I wonder if you will not be at La Ferté? Cannot I come for a night there? Only a few days before your letter came I was wishing that I could go there some day of our short stay, and take again that lovely drive to Jouarre. I cannot think of anything so delightful as to do just that. But first you will go to Paraÿs,3 and I hope that the change will be of great benefit.
     We had a very hard voyage. I was quite used up by it but I begin now to feel like myself again. We have had very cold weather here but Annie and Miss Garrett4 and I are getting on well on the whole. We have just spent one day at Pompeii and another at Paestum and today we are taking a quiet Sunday. We leave here for Athens on Wednesday, where you might be good enough to write us at the Hôtel Grande Bretagne.
     It is late and I must not write any more, but send this letter half-written and only filled with love. Pray give my kindest remembrance to Monsieur et Madame Delzant5 if you are already with them. I am so glad to hear that Madame Delzant is better.
     Yours most affectionately,
     Sarah
     Pray give my best messages to Monsieur Blanc.6

     NOTES
     1 On her fourth and final sojourn in Europe Miss Jewett stopped in Italy, Greece, Turkey, and France, where she did see Madame Blanc for the last time.
     2 La Ferté sous Jouarre, site of Madame Blanc's country house, a town in the Department of Seine et Marne, some forty miles east of Paris.
     3 Paraÿs, the home town of Alidor and Gabrielle Delzant, in the Department of Lot et Garonne, approximately four hundred miles southwest of Paris.
     4 Mary Elizabeth Garrett (1854-1915), daughter of John W. Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, was one of the five founders of The Bryn Mawr School in 1885, an early supporter of Bryn Mawr College, and a generous contributor toward the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She kept a cottage at Dark Harbor, Maine, where Miss Jewett stayed in the summer of 1895 before proceeding to Martinsville and writing The Country of the Pointed Firs. Miss Jewett dedicated Betty Leicester's Christmas "To M. E. G."
     5 Alidor Delzant (1848-1905), a bibliophile, editor, and author, wrote among other works a biography of the brothers Goncourt.
     His wife Gabrielle (1854-1903) was cited by Violet Paget for the "admirableness of her brains" and her "extraordinary charm of high breeding." Madame Delzant, an aspiring author, compiled extensive memoranda and rough drafts of books on Port Royal and the Princesse de Liancourt but did not live to publish them. Her husband edited Gabrielle Delzant: Letters, Souvenirs (1904).
     6 Madame Blanc's connubial experience was short and unhappy. She was married at 16, a mother at 17, divorced at 19. Thirty years passed before she saw her husband again, but he was in constant attendance during her last illness, and she bequeathed all her possessions to him. Alexandre Blanc, a financier, lost his money and estate in speculation.



113 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN

     Athens
     March 31, 1900

    Dearest Cousin Alice:

     The two names of places at the head of this paper seem strangely put together,1 but here I am, strange as it seems to me, and I have so often thought of you in the ten days since I came and wished to answer your most kind letter which reached me in Naples in my first mail from home. You were so kind to ask me to come to Brunswick and I should have been delighted to do so had I been at home. I was very much interested about my works being dramatized! and it gave me more pleasure than I can say to think that Brunswick was going to do them so much honor.2 I am sure that dear little Mary would do great honor to the heroine of "Mr. Teaby." She seems small for the part except in the size of her heart, and I may say young, but I don't doubt that she could make up in costume.3
     I am only away for a short time (I shall be at home the last of May), I am glad to say, for though I enjoy travelling quite as much if not more than most people, I hate the feeling of being so far away from home, and I often have to pinch hard to keep myself from giving way to homesickness in spite of every possible satisfaction and pleasure.
     It is delightful to find how much more beautiful Greece is than anybody ever gave me the idea. One must see the old marbles and the hill of the Parthenon for oneself, and nobody can write anything like the charm and the astonishing beauty of these old sights.
     Day before yesterday we drove to Marathon (twenty-five miles) and saw the famous plain with its great mound of earth that has stood so many centuries over the Athenian soldiers, and the bright sea in front of it and the dark mountains behind. You would have loved the gay wildflowers almost best of all -- they really made a brilliant carpet for the ground. There were little marigolds and big scarlet and purple anemones much larger than our pale ones, and two kinds of poppies and big blue forget-me-nots and tall stalks of asphodel and all sorts of things, and pale purple gillyflowers all along the beach with our familiar beach peas. And the old olive trees are most beautiful; they seem as old as the mountains and plains themselves. I must put in some leaves for you so you can imagine how silvery the trees look when the wind blows them.
     Give my love to Cousin Charles and to the girls and to David and Charlie. I do hope that Cousin Charles is nicely now as spring comes on. I shall certainly hope to see you all this summer either in Brunswick or Berwick or still better in both.
     I thank you again for your letter which was a double pleasure so far away. Yours, with constant affection,
     Sarah
     I am sure Mrs. Fields would send you and Cousin Charles a message but she has gone to sleep just now. She is very well indeed and enjoys everything so much.

     NOTES
     1 The familiar printed letterhead -- SOUTH BERWICK, MAINE -- is nullified by an undulant scrawl and is superseded by the handwritten Athens dateline.
     2 At the Pythian Hall on March 24, the Saturday Club, a local organization addicted to periodic "dramatic presentations," offered to the public its versions of Miss Jewett's short stories "The Quest of Mr. Teaby" and "The Guests of Mrs. Timms."
     3 Mary Gilman, 34, played the role of "elderly," procrastinating Hannah Jane Pinkham in this lyric of autumnal love.


114 ELIZABETH C. FIELD
     Elizabeth C. Field, sister of Rachel Field, the author of Time Out of Mind, All This, and Heaven Too, and other novels, as well as stories and plays for children.

     Constantinople
     May 4, 1900

    My dear friend (and Betty Leicester's!):

     You did not think when you wrote such a kind little letter that it would have to go so far to find me, and I am so sorry that it happened so, because if I had been at home I should have written very soon to thank you and your mother for a great pleasure. I am very glad that you both like my stories, and I hope that I may see you both someday to say better than I can now, how much I liked your letters. I shall not forget that you cared about Betty and Mary Beck, because while I was writing about them I grew very fond of them myself, and of Tideshead which I tried to write like my old and dear village of South Berwick in Maine as it was when I was your age. Now that I am older I find it every summer a little larger and busier and more like a large town, but then it was very green and quiet and you could nearly always hear the bobolinks or the golden robins when you stopped to listen. I should like to tell you which chapter of Betty I care about most -- it is the one where Betty goes 'up-country' with Serena to spend the day,1 but perhaps you will not like it as much as some of the others.
     I wish that you were here with me, looking out of this window that seems to open right into the Arabian Nights! I can see all sorts of turbans and men with trays of sweetmeats and women with funny veils over their faces, and I can see tops of mosques and minarets, and beautiful horses, and the queer wild dogs that live in Constantinople as if it were all their own. They don't belong to anybody but themselves, and they go about in funny little companies hunting for something to eat, though they don't look thin or troubled with anxieties of any sort, and when they are sleepy they take naps on the sidewalk or in the street and everybody turns out for them and steps over them carefully. Someday if you see them you must remember that I wrote about them and liked to see them too, but that I thought they barked a good deal every night!
     I am writing you a long letter, but I suppose that it is because I feel sure we should find many things to say if we were together. I hope that I shall see you someday, and I hope that I shall see your mother, and I send you both my love and thanks now, and when we do meet we must be a little like old friends, mustn't we? -- as if we had known each other a great while.
     Yours most affectionately, dear little Elizabeth.
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1Betty Leicester (1890),Chapter X. This peripatetic pattern was a favorite with Miss Jewett. It afforded her the opportunity to describe local countryside, the unique individuals to be encountered there, the universal custom of visiting, the details of interiors. In this chapter Miss Jewett presents the germ of the character which she developed fully in "The Queen's Twin" a decade later.


115 MARIE THÉRÈSE BLANC

     June 17, [1900]

    Dearest friend:

     I am so sorry that two weeks have passed since I came ashore and yet I have not sent you a single word. But my eye was still strained and I have had to be careful with it, and I have been as busy as I could be going once to Boston and to Manchester the day Annie moved down, and hurrying with some proofs and writing affairs that kept me from using my eyes for other things. So this is the first foreign letter to get itself begun, when I have others to write, you may be sure! And I have had your card from La Ferté and been so sorry for your anxiety about your son. It seems such a pity after his good journey.
     I am thinking so often about your work and hoping it is already finished and quite to your mind. I cannot say how eager I am to see it.1 Annie's copy of the Revue is not yet in hand. She thinks that the subscription ran out while we were away but we shall soon get hold of it.
     They are urging me almost irresistibly just now to give a long story to the Atlantic for next year, and I cannot yet dare to promise. I am so fixed in the habit of making short stories that I am not sure of being able to do the sort of thing I wish to do, of another sort -- you must say what you think!2
     I cannot help being glad that you got my note from Cherbourg though I often thought with shame of that much fumbled envelope which I discovered in a corner of my bag, in some useful capacity!
     It was such a joy to have that beautiful glimpse of Acosta.3 I feel so disappointed at having seen dear Madame de Beaulaincourt4 so very little, but after all I have seen her again. And I have seen you, dear, thank Heaven! Oh, do keep it always in mind that you are coming again next year.
     Theodore came home from college last night -- a great event in the family -- for his long vacation.5 He was heard loudly demanding "where this beautiful new silver dish came from?" Mary thanks you many times for her share, and I thank you all over again. It is lovely, with green oak leaves and green leaves and white flowers. I love it very much.
     Good night, do write as often as you can to your most loving
     S. O. J.

     NOTES
     1Tchelovek, a novel, appeared in four installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes from June 1 through July 15, 1900.
    2 Against her own better judgment and the advice of her friends, Miss Jewett acceded to the editorial importunities and wrote The Tory Lover, an historical novel quite outside her mode. It was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly from November 1900 through August 1901, and published as a volume by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in September 1901.
    3 The Chateau d'Acosta, Madame de Beaulaincourt's out-of-town residence, was situated at St. Gratien, some ten miles north of Paris.
     4 Ruth Charlotte Sophie de Beaulaincourt (1818-1904) was the daughter of the Maréchal Boniface de Castellane, a soldier who served with distinction under both Napoleons, and whose Journals she published in five volumes (1896-1898). An intimate of princesses and prime ministers, she counted Prosper Merimée and the Empress Eugénie among her friends. After a youthful career of uninhibited ardors, she had settled down to a staid existence in which the making of artificial flowers was now her chief distraction. Her salon, one of the most scintillating in Paris, was enhanced by her voluble wit. Marcel Proust, a protégé and regular attendant, used her as the model for Madame de Villeparisis in Remembrance of Things Past.
     Comtesse de Beaulaincourt had cherished Madame Blanc's mother, and continued in cordial relationship with Thérèse.
     5 Theodore Eastman attended Harvard College from 1897 to 1901, when he received his A.B. degree.


116 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN
 

     148 Charles Street
     Wednesday morning
     [February 6, 1901]

    Dear Cousin Alice:

     We have just received Mary's letter with the unexpected news of dear Cousin Charles's death which I feel very much. I have always been very fond of him, as you know, and so many memories of the past are associated with him and his kindness and affection to me and to all of us at home. I cannot but be thankful that he need suffer no more weakness and illness, but I shall always miss him. I send you a great deal of sympathy and my love to you and your children. You must remember a great many lovely things -- how ready he was to serve and help others, and to push forward things that he saw ought to be done, and the forgetfulness of his own interests which we have sometimes been sorry about, shows a different side. He did so many good things and gave so many good ideas to other people.
     I should be so glad if I could come on Friday but I have been ill since the beginning of last week with an attack of grippe and I cannot manage to sit up all day yet and I have not been out.1 Mary is here and sends her love to you all, and says that she shall go down on Friday, but she must return in the afternoon.
     With a great deal of love to you, dear Cousin Alice, and to Lizzie and Mary and David and Charlie.
     Yours most affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 This letter was written in pencil, with obvious difficulty, as by a person propped in bed; the handwriting notably less firm than ordinary with Miss Jewett. Unusual too is the repetitive quality and lack of verbal flow.


117 KATHARINE McMAHON JOHNSON
     Katharine McMahon Johnson (c. 1856-1924) was the wife of the Century editor, noted for her charm and simplicity as hostess to the circle of writers, artists, and political figures that thronged their home, the Brown House, on Lexington Avenue in New York City.

     34 Beacon Street
     Thursday morning
     [February 1901]

    Dearest Katharine:

     I thank you so much for such a dear and satisfying letter. You don't know what a real help it gives a fellow! I have my ups and downs about the story but I do think that it gathers as it goes on. The key of it is so different, and the pace of it so much slower, being a longer expedition, that I can see the wide difference there is between it and the Pointed Firs, for instance.1 One can't get the same immediate hold.
     It is certainly a dangerous thing to try to write something entirely different after one has been for years and years making stories as short and round as possible but I have long had a dream of doing this, as you know, and I suppose I had to do it.
     It is so hard to get an honest word like yours -- some people like to be kind! and other people are really indifferent! and neither praise nor blame counts unless the right person speaks, and says both halves of his thought.2
     I am at last here for my twice-delayed winter visit. I wish you could let me see you, dear, if you are coming into town with a spare hour.
     With my love to you and little sister,
     Your grateful and affectionate,
     S. O. J.

     NOTES
     1 The Tory Lover, an historical romance about John Paul Jones's experience at South Berwick during the Revolutionary era, was a distinct departure from Miss Jewett's customary preoccupation with contemporary rural and coastal New England characters. The story was currently running in the Atlantic Monthly. When issued as a book later, a copy in "good Tory red" was sent to the Johnsons. The original of this letter is pasted into that copy, now in the Colby College Library (see Letter 124).
     2 Henry James, an avowed admirer of Miss Jewett's homespun art, was one of those who chided her about The Tory Lover. He viewed it askance as an "ingenious exercise" of "misguided stamp and urged her to "Go back to the dear country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive." (Leon Edel, Selected Letters of Henry James [New York, 1955], 202-203.)
     Miss Jewett passed a day with James at Lamb House in Rye, England, on her third trip to Europe in 1898 (see M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess [Boston, 1922], 297-301). In company with Howells, James returned the compliment at South Berwick one memorably hot day in June 1905. Although James promised to write an introduction to Mrs. Fields's Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, he was unable to fulfill his intention.



118 IRVING B. MOWER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     March 22, [1901]

    Dear Mr. Mower:

     I am sorry that I have not had time either to see you or to write an answer to your letter, but owing to my illness I have been behindhand about my work lately. It was not such a bad case of the grippe for the month of February, but it has proved a bad hindrance.
     I have thought a great deal about your suggestions but without seeing my way to making a permanent historical exhibition or society just yet.1 Those persons, and they are many, who have valuable things, especially papers and furniture related to our town history, are perhaps their best custodians. I do think however that we may make the excuse of some public interest to have an exhibition, a temporary one, which would bring out such treasures. We could see what there is then and I could perhaps get the excellent idea started in people's minds. We must have a talk about it. I am just going to Boston for two or three days, and when I come back we must have a Library meeting. Do not you think so?2
     Yours with great regard,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Miss Jewett's opinion prevailed. No historical society was formed in South Berwick until recent years. However, the Local History Department of the Berwick Woman's Club held its meetings at her home.
     2 The Fogg Memorial Library, housed in a wing of the Berwick Academy, was the only public library in South Berwick at this time. It was administered by a committee of Academy officials and townspeople, of which Miss Jewett, her sister Mary, and nephew Theodore Eastman were members.



119 JOHN THAXTER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 3, [1901]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I must say first of all that I am very sorry indeed for your annoyance in regard to your affairs with Mr. Stedman. I well remember that you were guided in his direction by my advice, and that I spoke warmly to him about your work and the promise that it seemed to me to give. I fear that he must have gone to pieces. When I had to do with him before, he had been most business-like, and I knew that he was in contact with many publications of different sorts, but I have heard nothing of him now for a long time.
     About this story: I find in it a new proof of your gifts of observation -- it is wonderful how you get the talk of your characters. But I think that episode with the half-witted man is very unpleasant, too unpleasant, so that it may have been the reason why the story has failed of acceptance. It is as true and close a study of character as the rest, but quite too horrible, and carries a kind of disgust with it for the wretched creature.1 I don't think the story needs such a proof of the lover's helpfulness. I believe it would be better to leave it out. Your point in the assurance of the heroine's heart that she was not doing wrong is original. I would add a remark on the part of William that he didn't generally believe in doing evil that good might come, but he never had reproached himself about that foolin' of Mirandy. He might watch them some evening as they stood together happily in the houseyard, for a little final paragraph, and say this.
     I think that I should send the story to Mr. Alden again; but you may not like either my subtraction or my addition!
     In haste, with kindest regards,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTE
     1 Around this time Miss Jewett wrote to Annie Fields, in part: "I have in hand a story that poor John Thaxter sent me -- and I must write and say the other thing -- wonderful observation of people and the growing world but so little selecting power and some spots of a kind of brutal coarseness of apprehension that are hard to bear … I pity poor John but it does seem as if anybody might look at the magazines for himself and see what things are printed, as a sort of guide. He is toiling terribly at these stories, and they keep him busy, and so far it is well." (Houghton Library, Harvard)



120 JOHN THAXTER
 

     South Berwick, Maine
     [May-June 1901]

    Dear Mr. Thaxter:

     I think the first half of this new story is the best work you have done, but I don't feel sure that the story as a whole is as good as the last -- no, I like that and the one with the bird on the wave better. But there is such good humour in this. I wonder if you cannot think over the ending and make it a little freer. I am almost persuaded that I should have the dress prevail! And after all its visions and delays have Miss Sarah Burr reap a triumphant victory and when she goes to the parsonage she looks so splendid and puts on such an easy gayety with her new garment that the Captain finds her approachable and all is settled! What do you think of this? The other sister would affectionately admire -- you could dispose of her; but one's heart is appealed to by Miss Sarah Burr. I couldn't bear to see her cast down. I am sure Mrs. Thaxter will agree with me that she showed a splendid fight, and such funny determination.
     Have you tried the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia? They use a good many stories -- and Outing?
     I am very much hurried this morning, so please forgive such a letter as this.
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett



121 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN
 

     Pride's Crossing
     Beverly, Massachusetts
     July 10, [1901]

    Dear Cousin Alice:

     I thank you so much for your kind note which pleased my heart. I have wished to tell you how sorry I was that you have been ill, and though Mary gave you our love and my messages, I am not contented without sending one word myself. You must be very careful and not overdo, and get your strength back as fast as you can. When you feel like a little change, do please remember what a warm welcome waits for you in Berwick.
     Of course I was delighted and full of pride and pleasure in the Degree,1 if only because it would have pleased father so much. You know how warmly attached he always was to the college, and how some inheritance of that feeling has naturally come to me. I thought of Cousin Charles too, and that it would have given him pleasure, and how he would have half teased me, and said some serious things that would have made me feel a deeper pleasure than before. I miss him very much, even though I have not yet gone to Brunswick without finding him. He was always so kind, and put so many new thoughts into my mind whenever we talked together.
     I have almost finished The Tory Lover now, and I am very glad for I am almost too tired after more than a year's steady hard work. Lately I have 'kept at it' both morning and afternoon, and it has been almost too much. I am spending a few days just now with my dear old friend Mrs. Cabot but I go home early in the week.
     It must be about the time that you expected Cousin Fanny. I have not forgotten that I owe her a nice long letter which I was so glad to get. I hope that this time she will stop to see us on her way home. With love to you, dear Cousin Alice, and to David and Charlie and both the girls, I am
     Yours most affectionately,
     Sarah
     We have not seen Theodore since Commencement,2 as he went off on a cruise with some of his friends. We were delighted to think that he had done so well in college, with a cum laude and Honors in French, but he has kept close at his work, and done the best he could, dear boy.

     NOTES
     1 Miss Jewett received the degree of Doctor of Letters from Bowdoin College at the 1901 Commencement, the first woman to be so honored. She referred with unadulterated pleasure to her being "the single sister of so many brothers."
     2 Theodore Eastman received his A. B. from Harvard College in 1901, his M. D. from Harvard Medical School in 1905.


122 HORACE E. SCUDDER

     Pride's Crossing
     Beverly, Massachusetts
     July 12, 1901

    Dear Mr. Scudder:

     I think that this is the first time that the sight of your handwriting ever gave me a little pang! I wished it were I who had written first to you; I have been thinking of you and hoping to find the right hour when I might tell you how sorry I was to hear of your illness. Long ago, one late winter day, someone told me that you had been ill, but I thought of it as something quite in the past, a shadow that had not only come but gone again! and only within a few days I found out what a long and hindering siege this same illness had been. I am more sorry than I can say. I wish that I might have known, and might have at least said a word even if I could not do a thing or make some evidence of true and hearty sympathy. I have always suffered very much at times from the hindrance and defeat of illness -- as if I had always been a decent sort of mill that ran unexpectedly short of motive power. Now that I have grown older and behold such a long row of books, however, it seems as if I must have been writing every minute since I arrived in this world.
     I can't help hoping that you will like this last one -- The Tory Lover -- which has taken more than a solid year's hard work and the dreams and hopes of many a year beside. I have always meant to do what I could about keeping some of the old Berwick flowers in bloom, and some of the names and places alive in memory, for with many changes in the old town they might be soon forgotten. It has been the happiest year of work that ever came to me as well as the hardest. A good deal of the 'tone of things' which existed in those earlier days had survived into my own times: the fine old houses, the ladies and gentlemen of colonial days were not all gone. Dear Mr. Warner1 gave me the final push toward writing such a story when he was in Berwick once, and I am so glad to remember that he read some of the early chapters last summer and took pleasure in them.
     I am eager enough to get your Lowell2 into my hands. I hope that it is down for the early autumn? I suppose that we must wait for September in a new-bookless state now. It has the effect of sending me back to old friends and favorites, but I should like my Lowell sooner than I am likely to get it. I am just now spending a few days with an old friend, who is the best of readers and who likes a fresh book as well as anybody, but after grumbling because of summer vacations in the publishing world, I saw her sit down after breakfast to her Boswell, and there she is yet!
     Forgive me such a long letter, but it is next best thing to the talk with you which I wished for as I began to write. I have said nothing of the old days when I first came to know your unforgettable kindness and sympathy for what my young heart dreamed of writing. But those things are never going to fade from my mind.
     Please take my best thanks for your kind words about the Degree, and please remember me to Mrs. Scudder and your dear girl whom I hope to see again and to really know. And get well just as fast as ever you can, or you must be made to turn your back upon Chocorua and come to settle in Berwick where the tide comes up from Portsmouth exactly twice a day! and the Tamworth hills3 look blue in the distance.
     Yours most affectionately,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 See Letter 110, note 1.
     2 Horace E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1901). Miss Jewett was a frequent guest at Elmwood, Lowell's home, where the time was spent pleasantly discussing books and the art of writing. Lowell introduced Miss Jewett to the poems of John Donne, which she read "with perfect delight." The Boston Brahmin often mimicked her Maine accent and colloquialisms, reminding her waggishly that the state of Maine had once been merely a "deestrict" of Massachusetts.
     3 Vicinity of Chocorua, New Hampshire (see Letter 55, note 2).


123 SARA HOLLAND
     Mrs. Sara Ormsby Burgwin Holland (1859-1940) was married to Arthur Holland of Concord, Massachusetts, son of Frederick West and Harriet Newcomb Holland. Annie Fields's mother was Sarah May Holland.

     Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass.
     Monday
     August 26, [1901]

     Dear Sara:

     This must carry my affectionate good wishes for your share of our birthday, and assure you that I shall think of you and bless the day that you were born to be my younger mate and Arthur's wife and your Cousin Annie's cousin and so, my friend! I shall drink your health in the best beverage I can reach at the high moment of celebrating so illustrious a day.
     A few days ago I started a book on its way to you which I like for its American qualities: Captain 'Bob' Evans's autobiography.1 I am afraid that it is a clumsier volume than you will like on the edge of a journey, but it will keep! and give you and Arthur, beside, some idea of the quarrel over Sampson and Schley2 by their respective friends. At least this seems to be one exciting cause. Not that the quarrel is of great consequence; not half so much as this honest picture of a modern sailor's experience and character.
     Everybody is very well among the people for whom you care most here, only their hearts are very sad at Nahant from the loss of Willis Beal's dear little son. Annie and I happened to see him only a few days before he died -- a beautiful little fellow, and so delightful to his grandfather and grandmother as one could quickly see.
     I am deeply interested in your change of plans, and the giving up on Arthur's part of such overwhelming cares of business. I had a sudden certainty that dear 'Aunt Harriet' would have smiled upon such a decision with entire approval: her son has done a solid piece of good steady hard work all these years and earns his holiday, which is sure to be put into other work none the less. I love to think of his sitting down with a sigh of content to read all a workday morning! Annie and I thought that there was even a feeling of rest in his first letter. How many more hours you will have together now.3
     Thank you for your kind interest in The Tory Lover. I am just through with the book proofs and it comes out here and in London late in September.4
     With my love,
     Always yours most truly,
     Sarah O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Robley D. Evans, A Sailor's Log: Recollections of Forty Years of Naval Life (New York, 1901).
     2 Miss Jewett is referring to the public controversy over who was the "real" hero of the rout of the Spanish fleet at Santiago -- Admiral William T. Sampson or Admiral Winfield Scott Schley. Captain Evans was one of the several naval officers invited by Robert Underwood Johnson to give their versions of the battle in the Century (see his Remembered Yesterdays [Boston, 1929], 417-418).
     3 Despite the roseate picture of domestic leisure drawn by Miss Jewett, Holland did not retire from his iron, steel, and railroad enterprises (for a short period he was president of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad in Maine) until after he met with an automobile accident in 1916.
     4 The American edition was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston and New York; the British edition, by Smith, Elder & Company, London.


124 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 5, [1901]

    Dear Mr. Johnson:

     I am afraid that I cannot write about Madame Blanc! Mrs. Fields does such things better than I ever could, should you care to ask her,l and I would lend a hand if my hand were needed. I do not forget that I am to send you a sketch by and by -- the best that the winter crop has to offer -- but I have been so idle of late that no green shoots are yet appearing through the snow.2
     I hope that you received a Tory Lover in good Tory red or Patriot blue -- one was to be sent to you. He is doing very well indeed, I am glad to say. Some persons say that he should have been a second Country of the Pointed Firs, but how could the willingest of old story writers make two books just alike?(!)
     Please give my best messages to Mistress Katharine
     Yours always most truly,
     Sarah Orne Jewett

     NOTES
     1 "Notable Women: Mme. Blanc ('Th. Bentzon')" by Mrs. Fields appeared in Century, LXVI(May 1903), 134-139.
     2 Nothing came of this offer. Miss Jewett suffered an accident some months later which sharply curtailed her writing career.



125 MARIE THÉRÈSE BLANC

     South Berwick, Maine
     December 6, 1901

     What a dear and delightful letter, my dear friend! It gives me the greatest joy as I read it and feel that your journey has done you good -- I feel so distinctly all that refreshment of mind and body which you have gained. Oh, do not get cold now! Be very careful of yourself and take the best care, as you would of somebody else. You will write as fast as a steam engine, and miss the free air which you have had in all those weeks. And you must take care of you for my sake. Now we shall be looking for your chapters in the Revue which will make us share in your great Russian experience.1 This letter and the one that came before have given me much already, but I am eager for more -- and more!
     I am sorry that I was so unmindful about the Tory Lover affairs. I remember that you asked about a traducteur, but I have known and heard nothing. You said a most kind word in the Revue.2 I did indeed see that, and I believe that I must have thanked you. I wonder if you really think that it would interest enough French people? After all, there is much of France in it. I should think that France might find it more interesting than England!3 The notices of the press here have been excellent and it is having a good sale. I wish that it might have a new impulse because people liked it across the sea. I am at a loss about terms. I never can get anything very satisfactory from my publishers. Could not there be some proper sharing of the profits? In London I get twenty-five per cent of these. If you had not so much to do that is more immediate and important, I should have loved your doing with the book as you did long ago to my endless profit (a blessing in a friendship!) with the Country Doctor.4
     I see that Col. Higginson is having your paper about him put into an English edition; someone has translated it. You can hardly think what a pleasure it has been to him in every way.5
     I wish that you would fly to Berwick this very night! Mrs. Howe is coming for a visit of two or three days this evening; tomorrow she has promised to speak to a woman's club here in which Mary and I are much interested.6 Laura Richards, her daughter, comes too, and it will be very gay for you. Oh what joy if I could see you here again. I am already wondering when it can be: but tonight I promise you very good company which might not always happen, as you know, in Berwick!
     Annie has been very well. She was here last week again to spend Thanksgiving with us, and I was to go to town on Monday and then to Hartford for two nights to Mrs. Warner, but two things broke up my plans: first we had news of the sudden death of my uncle in Exeter,7 and I must go to the funeral, and at the same time I felt so ill with an attack of la grippe that I could hardly manage to get there and get home again -- and to my bed! But I am getting on much better today and Mrs. Howe will prove a good medicine for such a case.
     I have not yet turned to my work again. I cannot muster much energy yet, and all my magazine affairs are sadly behindhand. I must get hold of things before long. Next month I hope to be much in town, and to have some quiet weeks with Annie. After I make my annual visit to Mrs. Cabot in the early part of January I shall go to Charles Street to stay. In this busy, almost hunted year, I have been able to take very few quiet days, but it has happened that Annie has been alone very seldom -- with Miss Cochrane's8 long visit and others which would keep her from being uncompanioned.
     Theodore is working very hard in the Medical school.9 He is always much pleased by your kind messages, and Mary too, who is very busy as usual, and very cheerful in all her kindnesses. We are going to Charles Street next week.

    Dear friend, write to me as often as you can, it is a great pleasure to hear from you, and to have such a letter as this is a gift of diamonds! I cannot tell you how it delights me to read it, and to read it again.
     Yours most affectionately,
     S. O. J.

     NOTES
     1 "En Petite-Russie," Revue des Deux Mondes,      n.s. VIII (April 1, 1902), 595-637; second installment, n.s. IX (May 15), 357-399; "En Russie," n.s. XIII (February 15, 1903), 878-905.
     2 In "Dans la Nouvelle-Angleterre," Revue des Deux Mondes, CL (December 1, 1898), 544, Madame Blanc wrote: "South Berwick eut la bonne fortune de produire un romancier qui sait intéresser l'ancien monde comme le nouveau à une population si différente de ce que les étrangers ignorans croient être, en bloc, le peuple américain: un ramassis de gens très vulgaraires, très durs et de provenances mêlées. Lisez les esquisses de Sarah Jewett; vous verrez que le caractère des citoyens de la Nouvelle-Angleterre est avant tout la dignité: dignified, cette épithète revient souvent, et en effet elle exprime mieux qu'aucune autre les aspirations, la tenue, la conduite de chacun."
     3Le Roman d'Un Loyaliste was published in Paris by Hachette et Cie in 1905.
     4 Madame Blanc wrote a lengthy review of Miss Jewett's first orthodox novel: "Le Roman de la Femme-Médecin," Revue des Deux Mondes, LXVII (February 1, 1885), 598-632. Later, she translated the novel and included it with nine short stories in the volume Le Roman de la Femme-Médecin, suivi de Recits de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, par Sarah Orne Jewett. Préface de Th. Bentzon (Paris, 1890).
     5 Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), Unitarian clergyman, active colonel during the Civil War, author, and reformer, gave Emily Dickinson her first encouragement to publish. Madame Blanc's "Un Américain représentatif -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson," appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, n.s. III (June 1, 1901), 616-655, and was collected in her Questions Américaines (Paris, 1901). The English version, a small book translated by Emily Mary Waller, is A Typical American: Thomas Wentworth Higginson (London, 1902).
     6 Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), poet, editor, biographer of Margaret Fuller, lecturer and writer on abolition and women's rights, was a familiar visitor at the Jewett home.
     On December 13, 1901, the Somersworth (N.H.) Free Press reported her talk to the Berwick Woman's Club: "She spoke of Whittier, the farmer boy, of Longfellow, telling of his love for beautiful Fanny Appleton, many memories of Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell as 'A Man's Man, not a Woman's Man.' Before the program the Rev. I. B. Mower sang [Mrs. Howe's] 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' very expressively. Mrs. Laura E. Richards accompanied her mother and they were guests of the Misses Mary R. and Sarah Orne Jewett until Monday."
     7 John Taylor Perry, her mother's brother (see Letter 4, note 3).
     8 Jessie Cochrane, a gifted amateur pianist from Louisville, Kentucky, became something of a protégée of Mrs. Fields. After long and frequent trips to Europe, she would visit Mrs. Fields at 148 Charles Street and Gambrel Cottage in Manchester-by-the-Sea (see Warner's letter about his luncheon with Miss Cochrane, Dr. Holmes, and Mr. Howells, in Fields's Charles Dudley Warner, 165). Miss Cochrane attempted some writing but apparently did not achieve publication. One of her photographs hangs above the bureau in Miss Jewett's bedroom in the Memorial House at South Berwick.
     9 Miss Jewett's nephew attended Harvard Medical School from 1901 to 1905, when he received his M.D. degree.



126 ALICE DUNLAP GILMAN

     Pride's Crossing
     Beverly, Massachusetts
     July 12, [1902]

    Dear Cousin Alice:

     I am really ashamed to have been so long in writing to you after my delightful visit, for though Mary gave you my messages and wrote for us both, I wanted to tell you myself how often I think of the pleasure you gave us. I don't know when I have enjoyed a visit so much; Brunswick is always full of happy associations and everybody was so kind -- most of all, yourself.
     I was dreadfully sorry to lose nearly all of Lizzie's visit which Mary has enjoyed so much, but I had long been promised -- on the first of July to my old friend here -- and I had already put off coming until the fifth! Every year I say to myself that perhaps I shall not come again, but this summer I have found her better than for a long time before and we have been very happy together. Sometimes she hardly leaves her room when I am staying with her but now she gets down to breakfast, which is quite splendid. You would find the town of Beverly very little changed, but down along the shore it has been built up very much with summer houses, many of them very large and fine, like the Baxters', of which I am sorry that I could not see the interior. But we did so many things! I am not often so gay!!
     Do keep your visit to us in mind when cool weather comes -- you and Mary must come. I think of Cousin Fanny's being with you now and must give her my love. I hope that we shall see her on her way home. With love to all the family, believe me always
     Yours most affectionately,
     Sarah


127 JENNIE O. STARKEY
     Jennie O. Starkey (1863-1918) was the first professional female journalist in Detroit. Originally a staff writer, she later conducted several departments in the women's page and was society editor of the Detroit Free Press for thirty years.

     South Berwick, Maine
     October 5, [1902]

     My Dear Miss Starkey:

     I thank you for your very kind note which I should have been glad to answer at once but I am slowly recovering from a bad accident in being thrown from a carriage -- and even after some weeks I can write very little.1
     The story you ask about was printed with others in a volume called The Queen's Twin. Your letter gave me real pleasure and I am very glad indeed that you liked "Nora."2 I also have to thank your paper, the Free Press, for much pleasure in the past: I like to think that I have this good chance to say so!
     Believe me, with my best wishes for your own happiness in your work of writing,
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 The date of the disabling accident was September 3, 1902, Miss Jewett's fifty-third birthday. While taking her habitual afternoon ride that day, Miss Jewett was thrown upon the road head first when her horse suddenly slipped and fell going downhill. Miss Jewett did not seem to suffer any serious immediate effects, but the spinal concussion which resulted from the fall brought about recurrent headaches and weak spells, putting a virtual end to her literary productivity. Though she tried valiantly (see her letter to Willa Cather in Fields, Letters, 234-235), she wrote nothing of consequence after this mishap.
     2 "Where's Nora?" appeared first in Scribner's, XXIV (December 1898), 739-755.


128 EDITH FORBES PERKINS
     Mrs. Edith Forbes Perkins (1843-1925), of Westwood, Massachusetts, and Burlington, Iowa, was the wife of Charles Elliott Perkins, president of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. In 1931 her daughter Edith Perkins Cunningham edited the Letters and Journals of Edith Forbes Perkins, 1908-1925, in four volumes. Mrs. Perkins, a niece of John M. Forbes (see Letter 64, note 2), was friendly with Annie Fields, Susan Burley Cabot, Helen Choate Bell, Rose Lamb, and Mary Jewett.


     South Berwick, Maine
     February 19, [1903]

    Dearest Mrs. Perkins:

     The flowers are most lovely -- a true spring gathering, and yesterday was a winter day in Berwick, I can tell you! -- but they came as warm as toast in their box. As for the "basket to keep," it is a treasure indeed! Mary contemplated it with joy as if she meant to start for the garden at once. How kind you were to think of me! We were speaking of that charming luncheon only a day or two ago, and ever since you came from Burlington I have been wishing that I could see you, and following your gay career and the gay buds in the newspapers as best I could though Mrs. Cabot has been as kind as she could be in writing all winter.
     I was amusing myself lately by thinking how much I feel like one of those stupid old winter flies that appear out of their cracks at this time of year, but I know one thing -- how "sensible they are to kindness," as my grandmother would say.
     Next summer the trolley cars that go to York are to have a branch line to Berwick1 (change at Portsmouth Bridge!) and I shall hope that you can be coaxed to take the journey. It is a pretty bit of country from here to Little Boar's Head all the way.
     Please give my love to all the Monday luncheoners when you go again, and especially to Elsie2 next time you see her. I have thought about her a great deal and such a charming letter that she wrote me in the autumn.
     Yours most affectionately and with many thanks,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     Isn't it good that dear Mrs. Cabot has kept so well all winter? I don't know what I should have done if she had fallen ill too!

     NOTES
     1 The electric trolley lines of the Portsmouth, Dover and York Street Railway were extended to South Berwick during the spring of 1903.
     2 Mrs. Perkins' daughter Alice, wife of William Hooper, a Boston cotton mills, mining, and railway executive. Alice Perkins Hooper maintained a home in Boston and a cottage in Manchester-by-the-Sea, where she entertained many of the women in the Fields-Jewett circle. Helen Bell characterized her house as the only salon in Massachusetts



129 EDITH FORBES PERKINS

     [Boston]
     Wednesday morning [n.d.]

    Dear Mrs. Perkins:

     You were so kind to send me these lovely flowers, they are as bright as a little spring bonfire this gray rainy morning!
     It is very pleasant to be in town again, I can tell you! and to find dear Mrs. Fields so much better.
     Yours most affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett



130 MARIE THÉRÈSE BLANC
     [February-March 1903]
 

     …1… complain no more, this letter is dull enough without that!
     I wonder if it is too late to make a change or two in the French edition of my Tory Lover? On the 23rd page, for example, where (3rd line from foot) I say Prince of Conti, I should like to say Duke of Berwick, and on page 154 is a gap in the edition I sent Mlle Douesnel,2 and in your first edition a great mistake on the middle of the page! I said Duke de Sully at a venture and never corrected it until the second edition where the whole phrase was cut out. That should be Duke of Berwick too or read thus: "added the old Irish rebel, who had been like a son to his father's friend the great Duke of Berwick, Marshal of France." If there is a second edition I should like to have the first of these corrected in the plates (Prince of Conti erased for Duke of Berwick).3 I had a note of sympathy for my illness from the translator, but I fear that you have had a very trying and tiresome work in supplementing hers.
     Please give my affectionate homage to Madame de Beaulaincourt. It is delightful -- the success of Monsieur 'Ski.'4 I should like to send a new message of thanks for the postcards, which renew the delight of my day's visit -- I do not forget a moment that I spent at Acosta. Under your French skies the violets will soon be blooming again there, with the new Spring.
     My sister sends you her love. She has had a busy winter, as you will know, and Theodore has been working hard at his professional school. Timmy looks old, but his heart is ever young and a little affair of honour with dogs of the village sends him home wounded but victorious from time to time.
     I wish that you were here, my dear friend, in this bright winter weather. I do not know if I have told you that our good John has died -- it was in December, and from the effects of his army wound. You will know how much we miss that good friend and servant of nearly thirty years.5
     There is everything to say, and I have said nothing! I remember in this moment to ask you if you are really translating Lady Rose's Daughter for the Revue6as our newspapers say? I have been looking over the letters of Mlle de Lespinasse7 -- the story has curious likenesses of character with likeness of plot. Whatever one may say, it seems, so far as I have read, a great story and far beyond her others.8
     Yours with
     unfailing love,
     S. O. J.

     NOTES
     1 This is a fragment, the only part which seems to have survived.
     2 Mlle Douesnel translated Le Roman d'Un Loyaliste.
     3 On page 154 of the first edition (first state of text, red binding), lines 16-17 read: rebel, who had seen with his own eyes the great Duke / de Sully, Marshal of France. In the 1901 reprint (second state of text, blue binding), the sentence is curtailed after rebel and a two-line blank follows. Prince of Conti was not corrected on page 23 of the reprint.
     This also remains unchanged in the 1905 French edition (page 34), and a compression in the translation (page 200) eliminates all reference to Duke and Marshal.
     In the English edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1901), Prince of Conti is retained (page 20), as is the full sentence concerning Duke and Marshal (page 136).
     4 'Ski' is the diminutive of Viradobetski, the Polish sculptor and dilettante of "tous les arts" in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Miss Jewett is referring to the original of this character, a lifelong friend of Proust, Frédéric de Madrazo. A dabbler in singing, composing, and painting, he was a favorite in salons like that of Madame de Beaulaincourt.
     5 John Tucker (see Letter 14, note 2) died on December 4, 1902. During the Civil War he served in the 17th Maine Regiment and was wounded by a shell at the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863.
     6 Mrs. Humphry Ward's "La fille de lady Rose," translated by Th. Bentzon, appeared in seven installments in the Revue des Deux Mondes, n.s. XVII, from September 15 through December 15, 1903.
     7 Julie Jeanne Eléanore de Lespinasse (1732-1776) presided over one of the more famous salons in the Paris of her day. Her death is said to have been hastened by the marriage of Count de Guibert to another woman. The Lettres écrites de 1773 à 1776 by Mlle de Lespinasse contains a record of this unrequited love. First published by the count's widow in two volumes in 1809, it went through several editions, then was issued in 1893 with an introduction by Sainte-Beuve. The edition Miss Jewett probably read is the translation of this text by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, distributed by the Boston firm of Hardy, Pratt & Company in 1901, 1902, and 1903. In the Introduction to Lady Rose's Daughter -- volume XI, the Autograph Edition of The Writings of Mrs. Humphry Ward (Boston, 1910) -- Mrs. Ward reveals that she "saw the germ of a story" in "Sainte-Beuve's study of Julie de Lespinasse."
     8 With this opinion the translator took strong exception. On March 14, 1903, Miss Wormeley wrote to Miss Jewett: "With regard to the book I feel vexed with Mrs. Ward for having degraded Mlle de Lespinasse into an adventuress. I don't think she had the right to take a real person and insult her memory." (Houghton Library, Harvard)



131 SARAH WYMAN WHITMAN
     Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904) was one of the Charles Street coterie of talented women which included Celia Thaxter, Lilian Aldrich, Alice Howe, Helen Bell, Miriam Pratt, Rose Lamb, and Mary Lodge. Mrs. Whitman was a professional designer of stained glass windows, a painter, and an illustrator of books. She provided the decorations for the covers of Miss Jewett's The King of Folly Island, Betty Leicester, Strangers and Wayfarers, and The Queen's Twin. Miss Jewett dedicated Strangers and Wayfarers "To S. W., Painter of New England men and women, New England fields and shores." As one of her last literary endeavors Miss Jewett edited and wrote an unsigned preface to the Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman (Cambridge, Mass., 1907).

     South Berwick, Maine
     Tuesday
     August 4, [1903]

    Dear old fellow:

     Who should drive up to this door yesterday but old Helen!1 Mary had gone to the Junction to meet Theodore at the express train and Helen hopped out of one car, he from another, and was promptly sent afoot across Fife's lane to avail himself of the trolley car. Helen meant to walk up to the village, and she was amazed to find Mary waiting. I was amazed to see a smart hat, when Timmy2 and I were expecting a plain straw hat as we sat at the window. She was just as you said, and had one of those days of looking quite splendid (that's not the word but we have often speaked together of the moments). And travelled north by the afternoon express. It did this dull heart good to see her, and to hear about you and the Mexican drawn-work, and a quiet hour such as was to be long treasured. I had a sense of being replete with unanswered questions as soon as she had gone -- I begin to feel a little like my poor Joanna on Shellheap Island3 but please forgive the allusion. I have always seen my story people after they are written, so here's me! I always love to remember that you liked that chapter, and wrote the dearest letter.
     I had a great pleasure in Mr. Garnett's paper in the Academy4 lately. The least significant paragraphs were copied into the Tribune -- but one does so like to have somebody (who knows) speak seriously of one's work and stick fast to a point of view. He liked "The Hiltons' Holiday,"5 which I always call your story because of kind words. The whole thing made one feel as if perhaps the old inkbottle might be needed again, after all, one of these days, but it is strange how all that strange machinery that writes, seems broken and confused. One ought not to expect to write forever but I seem never to be thinking about anything now -- it's very dull!
     Yesterday my dear old uncle6 came for a visit and I stop now and then as I write to hear Theodore's loud discoursing voice. They talk about college and the medical profession as if they were exactly the same age -- one twenty-four this day and the other eighty last week, and not a bit the matter with either body or mind but a sad deafness. I love his dear gentle ways. Last night one of T's compeers (a charming young fellow, but caught in the nets of a poor foolish little bride) came up here from the shore. When they were saying good night, I heard the boy's voice and then Uncle Will's "Good night, Sir!" like an old Virginian. The tone was enough to make that sort of boy feel suddenly as if he had gone from private to Captain. I could hear it all down in the hall, and somehow -- perhaps it was the Southern touch of it! -- made me think of you.
     I should love to get you a pair of Rocky Mountain ponies used to steep inclines, so that you could 'rise' Thunderbolt Hill7 at will! Dear A. F. has such beautiful times with you this summer, and I hear about you. She writes very dear letters that give one a sense of being with her as one reads. I shall try again for a few days visit by and by, but I dread the trains still almost too much. Dear fellow, I think of you a great deal. I pray heaven to make you stronger -- not overdoing is the only real tonic! So no more at present from yours with love and pride,
     S. O. J.
     The garden is so nice -- old-fashioned indeed with pink hollyhocks and tall blue larkspurs. You might make a sketch with but slight trouble, with figures of old ladies wearing caps in the long walks. I seem to confuse your art with Mr. Abbey's!!8

     NOTES
     1 Helen Bigelow Merriman (1844-1933), artist and author of books and articles on painting and painters, was a Boston friend of Mrs. Fields. She usually summered at Stonehurst, the Bigelow estate at Intervale, New Hampshire. En route between city and country, she occasionally stopped off to visit the Jewetts without notice.
     2 A current cat or dog (see Letter 27, note 1).
     3 Chapters 13 and 15 in The Country of the Pointed Firs.
     4 Edward Garnett, "Books Too Little Known: Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's Tales," Academy and Literature, LXV (July 11, 1903), 40-41; collected in Friday Nights (New York, 1922). In Garnett's opinion Miss Jewett "ranked second only to Hawthorne in her interpretation of the spirit of New England soil."
     5Century, XLVI (September 1893), 772-778; collected in The Life of Nancy.
     6 Dr. William Gilman Perry (see headnote, Letter 3).
     7 The most vivid description of Mrs. Fields's "eagle's eyrie" is in Harriet Prescott Spofford's A Little Book of Friends (Boston, 1916), 19: "the steep avenue leads up to a wonderful outlook of beauty set in the midst of flaming flowers, three sides overlooking the wide shield of the sea, but the fourth side so precipitous that the broad piazza there is only a turret chamber above the tops of the deep woods and orchards below, with the birds flying under it, and looking far over the winding river, ripening meadow, and stretching sea again." A photograph of Mrs. Fields on the back piazza of Gambrel Cottage hangs in the breakfast room of the Memorial House at South Berwick.
     8 Edwin Austin Abbey (1852-1911) started as an illustrator of books and magazines but became internationally known as a painter of historical and literary murals. Essentially a portrayer of happy moods, he specialized in scenes of delicate lyrical sentiment.


132 ANNIE E. MOWER
     Mrs. Annie Elizabeth Caldwell Mower (1848-1932), wife of the Reverend Irving B. Mower, was a close friend of the Jewett sisters during his pastorate in South Berwick. She wrote the introduction to the 1930 Colby College Press edition of Lady Ferry.



     South Berwick, Maine
     September 18, [1903]

    My dear Mrs. Mower:

     I have been wishing that I could see you to tell you of my great sympathy in hearing of your aunt's death.1 I cannot help feeling that as her strength grew less it must have been a great comfort to her to watch your always increasing power of usefulness, but just because your cares and interests grow larger, you will miss her help and counsel all the more. We only understand the blessing of older friends and 'somebody to go to' as we grow older and put our hearts more and more into what we find to do. But to have such a counsellor once is not to lose her now; you will always have the blessing of her love and her true wisdom. The memory of such love and wisdom will go with you into hard places as well as happy ones all your life.
     It is always very touching to me to see a person whose influence has been widespread, take up the less-evident, the restricted service that age permits. There is a pathetic phrase that great men may live long enough to see themselves forgotten, but it is never so! I believe that their best teaching may be given then to those who are fortunate enough to be their nearest friends and they may give the golden value of their lives into a few fit hands. It is the loveliest inheritance, this of character, and the sense of true values, with the power of appreciation, make its best treasures.
     I am sure that you often feel lonely, with all your gratitude that the days of your aunt's failing strength are done, but you will have many happy thoughts, and a new sense of her nearness to you, for company and consolation. I am sure that it was a great comfort to her to have a niece like you. Believe me
     Yours very affectionately,
     S. O. Jewett
     NOTE
     1 Mrs. Mower's aunt, Eunice Caldwell Cowles, died on September 10, 1903.


133 MR. JAMIESON
     Unidentified.

     34 Beacon Street
     Boston
     February 23, [1904]

    My dear Mr. Jamieson:

     Your letter gives me great pleasure and brings up many pleasant and affectionate associations. Indeed I remember you and your dear mother, whose kindness and gentleness none of her friends could easily forget.
     I should like very much to see you and Mrs. Jamieson and to answer your letter without writing, but I have never got over a bad accident of more than a year ago, and though I have come to Town for a change, I am obliged to be very careful about keeping quiet.1
     I have only the copy of Mrs. Thaxter's book that she gave me,2 and I do not know of another, which could be bought, but I think if you go to Mr. Sullivan at Little and Brown's that he can find one for you, certainly by waiting a little; and you might leave an order, also, at Bartlett's in Cornhill3 where they deal chiefly in secondhand books. Sometimes at the bookstores in smaller cities one can find a book like that and in much better condition.
     Believe me
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 In May 1904 her "A Spring Sunday" appeared in McClure's, XXIII, 13-19;in 1907 she edited the Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman; in October 1908 "'The Gloucester Mother" appeared in McClure's, XXXI, 703, With these items her active literary career ended.
     2 Two books by Celia Thaxter are inscribed to Miss Jewett by the author: Poems, 11th ed. (Boston, 1883), and An Island Garden (Boston, 1894). One of Mrs. Thaxter's poems in manuscript, "Vesper," hangs in a frame with her photograph in the breakfast room of the Memorial House at South Berwick.
     3 N. J. Bartlett & Company was the most fully stocked of the several bookstores on Cornhill Street, Beacon Hill east of Scollay Square. Here could be obtained new theological works, fine books by discriminating presses, standard sets of English authors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, a few first editions, and the run of Georgian and Victorian volumes. Little, Brown & Company, located on Washington Street near the Boston Globe building, offered somewhat the same assortment. Both catered to the gentleman of moderate means intent on a general library rather than to the special collector.



134 MESSRS. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
     Of the twenty books Miss Jewett published during her lifetime, seventeen were produced by Houghton, Mifflin & Company or its antecedents, James R. Osgood & Company and Houghton, Osgood & Company.


     South Berwick, Maine
     October 1, [1904]
     Gentlemen:

     I thank you for your kind messages during the summer to which I could not make any answer, in fact, I have but lately begun to look over the many letters, etc., which had accumulated. I am still kept on short commons of either writing or reading, but there are one or two things which I wish to say.
     I find another long letter from Mr. Edward Garnett1 of London (the writer, as Mr. Mifflin will remember, of some letters on the part of Messrs. Duckworth & Co. in the late winter) inquiring again as to the prospect of a new edition of my books, and saying that they would take 1000 copies of each volume, etc. I do not press for an immediate decision but lay the matter again before you.2 (I should feel bound, in case of such a plan, to speak also to Messrs. Smith & Elder.)3
     And I have noticed among the letters that I have been going over, a good many from young persons who seem to have taken my stories of Betty Leicester much to heart. This, with the remembrances of Mr. Garrison's4 writing me last spring of these books having done noticeably well in the last six months, makes me feel that we might do well to put them in some way freshly before the public this autumn and take advantage of the wave of new interest which seems to exist, and in a way that really surprises me. But will you please give directions at the Press that the old binding should be restored to Betty Leicester? -- the scarlet and white -- for it is an ugly little book at present; the die does not sit well sidewise on one corner and this green and red cloth are very far from the beauty of Mrs. Whitman's5 charming design. Even if the original cloths are no longer in market, I should think they might be approached in colour without much trouble.
     Believe me, with kindest regards and thanks, especially to Mr. Mifflin and Mr. Garrison for their letters,
     Yours most truly,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Edward Garnett (1868-1937),English critic, essayist, playwright, and literary adviser to several British publishers over the years, had a hand in developing the careers of Conrad, Galsworthy, and D. H. Lawrence, among others. In his long letters to Miss Jewett during this period Garnett expresses pleasure that Duckworth & Co. has introduced The King of Folly Island to English readers, urges that she secure permission for them to reissue Deephaven from the American sheets, assures her that Duckworth is interested in putting out a new selection of her stories, thirty of them in "a modest edition of (say) three volumes," and says that he is advising Fisher Unwin to publish The Country of the Pointed Firs.
     In the letter Miss Jewett cites here (August 31, 1904, on Duckworth stationery), Garnett specifically proposes that Houghton Mifflin publish an edition of The Best Tales of Sarah Orne Jewett, the first volume to be an entirely new work; volumes II, III, and IV, Selected Tales; volume V, The Country of the Pointed Firs. "I believe that Duckworth would take a thousand copies of each volume if such an Edition could be arranged." (Colby College Library)
     2 No formal edition of Jewett Works was ever published. In 1910 Houghton Mifflin reissued seven volumes in uniform bindings but from the original plates, which were called collectively Stories and Tales. The books included: Deephaven, A Country Doctor, Tales of New England, A Native of Winby, The Life of Nancy, The Country of the Pointed Firs, The Queen's Twin. An English edition was brought out by Constable & Company (London, 1911).
    3 Smith, Elder & Company published The Queen's Twin (London, 1900)and The Tory Lover (London, 1901).
    4 Francis Jackson Garrison (see headnote, Letter 22).
     5 Sarah Wyman Whitman (see headnote, Letter 131).



135 ELIZABETH J. GILMAN

     Poland Spring, Maine
     Friday evening
     [September 22, 1905]

    My dear Lizzie:

     I thought that I should send you a 'line' at once, but I found myself pretty tired and I have not tried to do much. I undertook rather too many things the week before I saw you, and after keeping myself wound up like an old watch, I seem to have stopped now and quite run down. That's just what I came to do! Now that I think of it -- it is so easy to gain a little strength and so much easier to spend it again, that a patient like me doesn't get ahead. I am quite by myself here, which is good. I only know one person in this great place, a Cambridge acquaintance, for most of the company seems to be from the West or from Philadelphia, not very interesting to my eyes either, but quite splendidly arrayed!
     I heard from Mary that she got home all right on Tuesday and yesterday she was going to York with Eva to luncheon. It was really a splendid day here. I am more and more thankful that we could have those few hours with you on Monday, and you will not need to have me say how many dear memories filled my heart of your mother's affection and kindness to us all. You know how much we all loved her, and how near Mary and I shall always feel to you four children. You will have a great many sad times in missing your dear mother, but I am sure that the happiness of knowing how she was loved, and how much you all did to make her happy, especially in these last years, will be a great comfort.
     With true love to all, and I shall often be thinking of you, dear Lizzie,
     Yours very affectionately,
     Sarah O. Jewett
     If there has been some notice of your mother in the Brunswick paper, I should be so glad if Charlie would be kind enough to send it to me.



136 THOMAS FRANKLIN WATERS
     Reverend Thomas Franklin Waters (1851-1919), pastor of the South Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, was president of the Ipswich Historical Society and author of a score of books and pamphlets on local history. In 1884 he served as toastmaster at the 250th anniversary of the incorporation of the town.


     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     February 23, 1906

     My dear Mr. Waters:

     I am very sorry to be so late in thanking you for your kindness in sending me this most interesting reprint of the Cobbler,1 with all its notes and reports. I have been enjoying everything between the covers while I have been silent, but I have had an attack of winter illness in addition to my usual difficulties about writing, etc!
     I have wished to tell you, too, how much I found in the Ipswich history.2 I only wish that there were another volume, with more about the famous schools and the famous early and late ministers. I could almost make a list of Contents!
     Believe me, with my best thanks,
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, in America (London, 1647), reproduced by the Ipswich Historical Society with facsimiles of title page, preface, headlines, and exact text; an essay, "Nathaniel Ward and The Simple Cobbler" by Waters; and the proceedings of the annual meeting in Publications of the Ipswich Historical Society, XIV (Salem, Mass., 1904). Reverend Ward, a scholar and jurist, was minister at Ipswich in 1634-1637. His book, a rambling satire interspersed with lively couplets, was a protest against religious and political toleration, published under the pseudonym Theodore de la Guard.
     2 Waters' Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Ipswich, Mass., 1905) was published by the Ipswich Historical Society.



137 SAMUEL THURBER
     Samuel Thurber (1879-1943),was a teacher of English at Newton (Mass.) High School. He assigned his senior class to read and write reviews of some Jewett stories, then sent the critiques to her.


     South Berwick, Maine
     May 9, 1906

    My dear Mr. Thurber:

     I thank you for your kind and delightful letter which gives me great pleasure, and for the criticisms of the class which I find very interesting indeed. There is a very uncommon clearness and frankness in nearly every one of them, and so surprisingly little of the fumbling with words that so often -- both in old and young persons! -- attempts to hide a lack of thought. My heart goes out to the young friend who complains that "there are a great many words but nothing seems to be going on" in one of the stories! But it is pleasant to discover more praise than blame (as one should always like to do in 'criticism'). They try to find the reason why they like things and do it in a most genuine and sincere way.
     I cannot help thinking that my stories must be difficult for girls and boys like these -- they are so often concerned with the type rather than the incident of human nature. I should dearly like to know whether they would care as much for a story I once wrote -- or stories -- about a girl of fifteen, Betty Leicester. I should like at any rate to send the two little books to you. I was thinking most affectionately as I wrote them of some of the problems that must often be in your own mind. Perhaps there is a School Library where you would give them a place?
     I could not make you understand how much pleasure you have given me without explaining that it is four years since I have been able to write at all, and even yet my old and very dear habits of life, seem quite forbidden. 1 had a bad accident from the fall of a horse, and struck my head a blow from which it does not easily recover. To know that my stories are alive in the best sense, and going on, pleases me more than I can easily say. I always used to remind myself of that great saying of Plato -- that the best thing one could do for the people of a State was to make them acquainted with each other1 - and now I find that these boys and girls really liked to know my story people, and are sure that they have seen others just like them. I should like to see the class, and indeed I hope that I may some day have the pleasure of seeing you. I feel a delightful sense of friendliness and understanding of what I wished to do with the stories in your letter. You have given these young people a real power of enjoying what they read, one of the best of the golden gifts a teacher can ever give.
     Believe me, with true regard,
     Yours sincerely,
     Sarah Orne Jewett

     NOTE
     1 See Letter 63, note 6.



138 SAMUEL THURBER

     South Berwick, Maine
     May 21, 1906

    My dear Mr. Thurber:

     I have kept these compositions longer than I meant to keep them, but I wished to read them again. I found that I had read [with] pencil in hand at first, and was just meaning to rub out my comments, when I thought that they were the things I should have said if we had been speaking together about these young friends. So, when you see them, please rub out with a good efficient bit of india-rubber all that should be rubbed out, for me.
     The compositions are really interesting -- it is delightful to find a phrase right from the young heart and brain that begins to work out its own problems. One longs to know just what this young friend or that means, exactly, by "humorous" or "exciting" -- but often young friends (like old ones!) use words without thinking exactly what they do mean. I am for a class in definitions and derivations! -- then we might not use criticize as if it could only mean to find faults.
     But I must not write longer. I thank you again for a true pleasure, and beg you to believe me
     Yours sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett



139 VIOLET PAGET
     Violet Paget (1856-1935), a writer of English parentage, lived most of her life in and around Florence, Italy. Under the pen name of Vernon Lee she turned out some thirty volumes of fiction, drama and essays on philosophy, esthetics, and the Italian Renaissance. A brilliant and sensitive personality, she cut a conspicuous figure with her short hair and tailored clothes.


     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     March 17, [1907]

    My dear Vernon Lee:

     I have just read again -- again, again! -- your preface to Hortus Vitae and "New Friends and Old,"1 and then I laid down the book and took up my pen feeling as if you were new friend and old, together and at once! And now Madame Blanc has gone too, and every way I turn I find one of her letters, in a book, in a desk, as if she still put them into my hand and still tried to speak in that way, as if summers of old spoke in their withered leaves and pressed flowers, hid in some safe corner. We were very near to each other. I remember the wonder of it filling my heart as we were walking along a favorite bit of road of mine in the country between two pastures and beside the scattered pines. "What is this?" she would ask, and I would say 'juniper' or 'bayberry.' "I have read of it," and she would smile soberly, as if she met an old friend for the first time; and at last I got over the wall and picked a handful of scarlet columbines and on we went again -- the horse now gone far ahead -- but I stopped short and faced her and there we stood in the narrow road together. "How did we come to be walking here together?" I cried. "I am made of this spot, but you! How came this afternoon to be ours?" She smiled at me just as if she knew, but we both understood that only Those who are wiser than we give gifts like that: there we were close enough, though Berwick and the Quartier and Saint Cloud2 might be far enough apart.
     You will know why I write all this, else I should not have sat here and let my pen write it.3 I shall always be missing her as new things and new days come and go without her, but the old days -- nine years writing before we met and fifteen years since -- are mine, with all she was and all the friendship gave me.
     I have never forgotten the day that Mrs. Fields and I went to take luncheon [with] you at Maiano4 that Spring day when the flowers were growing along the banks of your brook like the foreground of one of Botticelli's pictures. I begged a little flowered Italian bowl of you, and I keep it on a shelf in my bedroom for an outward and visible sign!
     And in Paris, again; Mrs. Fields has seen you since in Rome, but not long enough or quietly, as she wished. I am with her now; we often talk of you and the more because after a long long illness after a bad accident to my head (and heels!) in driving, I have begun to read, and write a little too at my letters as I used, and I have gathered up your books, that came while I was in a wintry state, and now come along with you, shyly hoping some day to really get hold of your hand. But as somebody said once about writers -- we are never so confidential as when we address the whole world -- and with the books I may get closer than some who are near enough to do the other thing. And I send you a truly thankful and affectionate message by this letter.
     Shall you never come seafaring? Shall you never come to New England -- not for myrtle and olive (oh, the ashes of those branches that you brought from Corsica!) -- but for juniper and bayberry? I wish, and Mrs. Fields wishes, that you would. Come summer or winter, as you like.
     Sarah Orne Jewett
     And all this I have written -- and of Ariadne in Mantua not one word, but I have the most dear copy of it -- the one with the Italian paper to its cover -- lying here on my desk.5

     NOTES
     1 Vernon Lee, Hortus Vitae (London, 1904), a volume containing twenty-three "Essays on the Gardening of Life"; the preface is in the form of a letter "To Madame Th. Blanc-Bentzon"; "New Friends and Old" is a philosophical review of the "joys quite especial to old friendship."
     2 Madame Blanc's home on the left bank of the Seine.
     3 Miss Paget also knew Madame Blanc intimately, had visited her in Paris, and had been introduced by her to the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes.
    4 Site of Miss Paget's villa, Il Palmerino, at San Gervasio, outside of Florence.
     5 Vernon Lee, Ariadne in Mantua: A romance in five acts was published in 1903 by B. H. Blackwell (Oxford), and by Simpkins, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. (London). The wrapper of eighteenth century paper by Giuseppe Rizzi of Varese was of geometric design, based upon a floor or textile pattern. It reflected the rebirth of interest at the turn of the century in medieval Italian abstract art.



140 VIOLET PAGET
 

     North East Harbour
     Mount Desert, Maine1
     [July 1907]

    My dear Miss Paget:

     I have been so ready to thank you all these weeks that I can hardly feel ashamed of seeming ungrateful. You cannot know how much I loved your letter and that most loveable chapter about our dear Madame Blanc2 written with such sympathy and discernment, from the perfectly right point of view; it seems wonderful to me that anyone so much younger could have taken it who had not lived with her for long stretches of time. There were so many Thérèses if one had her for a day or two at a time! The great French lady of -- one, almost, say some centuries earlier, returned to earth and gracefully adapting herself to modern conditions, was what everyone could not see. Oddly enough, one of my dearest friends on this side of the sea was great-granddaughter of a young French officer who came over at the time of the Revolution, and one never understood her until (and many New Englanders never could!) one returned to the 1760s and matched her traits to that day and date and to the habits of people who had to do with courts and camps.3 But to say how I miss Madame Blanc and see new reasons for having loved her so much is quite impossible. Your memories of her bring her back as nothing else has done.
     I am not forgetting to thank you, either, for Sister Benvenuta.4 I brought that dear little volume with me in my kit. I doubt if we are separated for a good while to come; it is a true bit of life. It explains many quite unrelated things, with the charm that a new flower had the other day (perhaps it was only a forgotten flower) that I found on a green island on the Maine coast here where I have been cruising on a comfortable old sailing yacht with a friend. You would have loved the small harbours with their villages where we spent the nights and often an evening and clear, still morning. The birds sang all along the wooded shores and the lambs bleated, the waves plashed against the rocks after a boat went by, and one heard no other noises. I had been ill for a month with a second quite uncalled for attack of influenza, and I certainly liked those noises better than any. I send you a bit of 'pointed fir.' Their new tips look almost as if they had flowered in pretty fringes. The salt air, the fragrance of these woods makes one a little lightheaded sometimes.
     The other day I gave a card to two acquaintances, lovers of Italy who go to see her for the first time: Miss McCracken,5 a magazine writer of talent, and true, shy, little lover of best things, a Southerner by birth; and Miss Julia Marlowe,6 the player who has just been having a good season in London, Viola and Juliet not beyond her. She has had great popularity in lesser parts, but I think she has great gifts, unequal as artists are; but I look to see her gain much from this Italian summer. They both loved the Ariadne in Mantua.7 I doubt if they are lucky enough to find you for half an hour, but they can have the drive to your door, and that is giving them much.8
     I confess to having lived with you a good deal, since your letter came and really brought you not only to my door but inside, to stay. This letter thanks you for many things. I hoped you would say that this was the summer when you could come -- to sail over from England in June is not long, and you should have a tin bank when you got here and go home clinking and heavy with savings. You should be withheld from long journeys and only shown a very few places. Autumn is better than midsummer: come in autumn!
     If I were writing a week later I should send you messages from Mrs. Fields, whom I shall see then. She is not very strong nowadays, but always such a giver of help and pleasure. You would like her summer house close by the sea, as much as I do, and I hope you would like my own old house in a country village with a proper New England garden.
     I must stop writing, but please find all that I write without ink, and please, my dear friend, write one day again. I can take your books, old and new, all for letters now, but that very fact makes me wish to hear again.
     Yours affectionately,
     S. O. J.

     NOTES
     1 Many of Miss Jewett's friends had cottages at this Maine summer resort and yachting center -- the Parkmans, Wheelwrights, Merrimans, Eliots, and Irwins. Miss Jewett never lost the sense of exhilaration in a sea-ride, and she accepted their invitations up to the last years of her life, despite her wracked condition. On this occasion she was staying at the cottage of Mary Cabot Wheelwright's parents, Otherside, and enjoying gamely the cruises down the Maine coast in their yacht Hesper, an ex-pilot boat.
     2 The dedication of Miss Paget's Hortus Vitae, addressed to Madame Blanc, is in fact a ten-page eulogy of Gabrielle Delzant, for whom Miss Paget had intended the book, but who died before it was issued.
     3 Miss Jewett's connection with the French tradition had roots in her own family. Her paternal grandmother Sarah Orne (see Genealogical Chart), of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was of French descent on her mother's side. Miss Jewett used proudly to claim that her father "had inherited...from his mother's French ancestry, that peculiarly French trait, called gaieté de coeur."
     4 Vernon Lee, Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child (London, 1906).
     5 Elizabeth McCracken (1876-1964) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. A frequent contributor to Youth's Companion, Outlook, and the Atlantic Monthly, she also produced several volumes about women and children. She was for six years an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company, and later an associate editor of The Living Church. As a result of her comments in The Women of America (New York, 1904) about The Country of the Pointed Firs, Miss McCracken met and became friendly with Miss Jewett. In the five remaining years of Miss Jewett's life, Miss McCracken saw her often, sometimes at Mrs. Fields's Manchester cottage where she usually visited for a week during the summer, and several times at South Berwick. The card of introduction to Miss Paget came to Miss McCracken from Northeast Harbor in a letter written in late July 1907 (see Fields, Letters, 229-231).
     6 Sarah Frances Frost (1865-1950), an English-born but American-trained actress who played under the name of Julia Marlowe, was famous for her portrayals of Shakespearian heroines, with her husband, E. H. Sothern, generally in the leading male role. Miss Jewett met her not more than three times and never long enough for real acquaintance; the first time a backstage introduction by Miss McCracken, a friend of Miss Marlowe's since schooldays; and again at a "ladies luncheon" which Mrs. Fields gave for Miss Marlowe during her engagement in Mary Johnston's The Goddess of Reason, which played in Boston, December 1908, prior to its New York opening.
     7 Miss Jewett ardently but unsuccessfully urged Miss Marlowe to produce and play in Miss Paget's Ariadne in Mantua.
    8 Miss Jewett's skepticism was well founded; the travelers did not find Miss Paget in when they called, but Miss McCracken did meet her later in England.



141 VIOLET PAGET
 

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     January 3, [1908]

    Dear Miss Paget:

     I have been waiting too long before sending my acknowledgment of your letter which brought me true pleasure -- perhaps the best thing of all is that you are letting me try to do something for you! I cannot send word yet of any decision about the papers. The Atlantic is just now printing some French sketches (rather more like useful tanks than hillside springs!!) by Mrs. Wharton,1 and I am waiting to hear from one New York editor, and failing him I shall wait until I can see another myself.
     Mr. Perry, of the Atlantic, spoke with the most true appreciation of your work -- you have had few better or more affectionate readers -- but he has had some difficulties in following his personal choice -- how little young, beginning writers are aware of this! -- and I suppose too that the late difficulty in financial affairs makes the magazines careful about new ventures. But I am full of hope about these English sketches, only do not be impatient if it seems to take longer than is reasonable.2
     I am just ready to thank you for The Sentimental Traveller volume -- it is delightful -- "The Bead-Threader"and "La Ferté"3 first in my heart. You do not know your group of readers here as I do. They are at any rate the ones you would choose and wish to have.
     Mrs. Fields would send you a message of most friendly remembrance. We are looking for Miss Cochrane presently on her way back to Rome. This note must be but an eager forerunner of a later letter but I must say before I end it that I am following you in Greece with sheer joy! I bless the friend who won you to go just now -- only I hope next time that you will go in March as I did and see the Greek flowers.
     Yours most sincerely and affectionately,
     Sarah Orne Jewett

     NOTES
     1 The first of four installments of Edith Wharton's "A Second Motor-Flight through France," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, CI (January 1908), 3-9.
     2 Miss Paget's letter to Miss Jewett (Colby College Library) was written on October 25, 1907. Miss Paget explains that she is planning "to make an English Writer's Notebook on England" out of six essays but first wishes to publish them in American periodicals. The Atlantic Monthly had taken two installments but refused the remainder; would Miss Jewett offer the serial copyright of these "to anyone you think likely to take them."
     "An English Writer's Notes on England" had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIV (July 1899), 99-104, and LXXXVIII (October 1901), 511-519. Miss Jewett, now inoperative for over five years, was unable to place the others, but Miss Paget ultimately succeeded in disposing three of them to Scribner's, which presented them under the same title, with the following subheads: "Things of the Past," LIV (August 1913), 177-194; "Things of the Present," LIV (November 1913), 609-619; "The Celtic West," LIV (December 1913), 712-724. Neither the sixth essay, titled "Some Cathedrals and Oxford," nor the projected volume was ever published.
     3 Vernon Lee, The Sentimental Traveller (London, 1908); "The Bead-Threader's Funeral and the Church of the Greeks," 94-102; "La Ferté-sous-Jouarre," 218-230. The first must have aroused Miss Jewett's memory of her own account of a funeral in Deephaven, 210-223; the second, concerned their mutual dear friend, Madame Blanc, who had died less than a year before.



142 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON
 

     148 Charles Street
     Boston
     February 17, 1908

    Dear Mr. Johnson:

     Mrs. Fields gives me your letter: the date of Madame Blanc's death was February 5th, 1907.1 We have been thinking of her very often in these last days, especially as we happened to have a friend staying with us who was also her friend and had seen her much within a year or two of her death.
     Yesterday I happened to come upon this biography-in-brief, and I put it into my envelope, as you may like to make sure of some other points, though it is not exactly infallible! I should like to have it back again.
     I miss dear Madame Blanc's constant letters; it was delightful to know about France or Paris through her, and in every way I miss her more and more. I hear once in a while from her good nephew Comte Louis de Solms, and last year I used to get letters from Miss King,2 but I have never seen her and of course our only reason for writing was not to last always. I believe that she is still in France.
     Mrs. Fields sends all her affectionate messages with mine to you and to Mrs. Johnson. We are going on in usual winter ways, that is, winter ways of these late years! We are so much interested about your son's play. I had heard already about The Comet and I wish it and its author all good fortune.3
     Yours most sincerely,
     S. O. Jewett

     NOTES
     1 Johnson appended the following footnote to Th. Bentzon's "Literary Rolls of Honor in France," Century, LXXVI (May 1908), 3-17: "Madame Thérèse Blanc, author of this article, died in February, 1907. She was one of the few women admitted to the Legion d'Honneur. Aside from her writings, chiefly novels, some of which had the distinction of being crowned by the French Academy, she appealed to Americans by her interest in our literature, the knowledge of which in France she greatly promoted, and by her sympathetic regard for American ideals. She followed especially the progress of women in this country, and wrote a volume on the subject. In The Century for May, 1903, will be found an appreciative article regarding her by Mrs. James T. Fields. -- The Editor."
     2 Grace Elizabeth King (1852-1932) was a writer of local color stories of Creole life in New Orleans. She recreates her warm association with Madame Blanc in Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York, 1932). While down South during her 1897 sojourn in the United States, Madame Blanc stayed at Miss King's home. Miss King lived in the same house as Madame Blanc in Meudon during the last few months of her life.
     3 Owen M. Johnson (1878-1952) is best remembered for his novel Stover at Yale (1911). The Comet, starring exotic Alla Nazimova, opened at the Bijou Theatre in New York City on December 30, 1907, and had a run of fifty-six performances, which ended two days before this letter was written.
 



     The crippling accident sustained by Miss Jewett in 1902 severely curtailed her customary orbit of activity. The doctor's orders were stern: a minimum of reading, writing, and traveling. Inured to debility by long experience in childhood, she could now assume a tone of comic wistfulness about her condition: "The trouble was that I came down on my head, and there is apparently some far greater offense in half breaking one's neck than in breaking it altogether." Slowly she resumed familiar rituals of existence. She began to read with some regularity. She wrote, nothing but letters -- her several abortive attempts to compose a short story produced only vertigo. She kept in touch with her regiment of friends, adding in these last handicapped years three new, vitalizing associations: Alice Meynell, Grace Elizabeth King, whom she never met, and Willa Cather. Precariously, she essayed a journey or two. She went to the mountains in company with a nurse, stayed a season on Mouse Island in Boothbay Harbor, and took repeated trips to 148 Charles Street notwithstanding the hazards and discomforts of travel.
     On one of these holidays in the home of Mrs. Fields, her most abiding friend, Miss Jewett was stricken with apoplexy in March 1909. Her mind remained lucid but paralysis afflicted one side of her body, leaving her physically inept. She was transported by special railroad car to South Berwick and carried immobile into the house. No spark returned. She sat for hours at the upstairs windows viewing moodily the volatile scene in the town square. Upright in her wheelchair, she received old friends, rejecting impatiently all mention of illness or overt signs of sympathy. She drank in avidly the minutiae of her beloved household, probably recalling her declaration of long ago: "I was born here and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and growing, and all the chairs in their places."
     On May 20, 1909, she sent a letter to Mrs. Fields, a letter so fitfully penned, so erratically spaced that Mrs. Fields wrote dolefully at the bottom of the page: "My courage and hope ended with this note - A. F." (Houghton Library, Harvard.) Little more than a month later, Miss Jewett suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. On Thursday, June 24, she died.
     Recipient of scores of tributes in her lifetime, Miss Jewett might well have selected as her epitaph these lines indited for her by Whittier in his sonnet "Godspeed":
 

     …her for whom New England's byways bloom,
     Who walks among us welcome as the Spring,
     Calling up blossoms where her light feet stray.
 

     Although she constrained her view to the environs of South Berwick, her vision encompassed the wider world of simple people everywhere. Wherever sentiment and sincerity are looked upon as cardinal virtues, the spirit of "Miss Sarah" continues to walk.
 
 
 



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