to Sidney Colvin

[Saranac Lake], April 9th!! 1888

MY DEAR COLVIN,—I have been long without writing to you, but am not to blame, I had some little annoyances quite for a private eye, but they ran me so hard that I could not write without lugging them in, which (for several reasons) I did not choose to do.  Fanny is off to San Francisco, and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner’s.  Where we shall go I know not, nor (I was going to say) care; so bald and bad is my frame of mind.  Do you know our—ahem!—fellow clubman, Colonel Majendie?  I had such an interesting letter from him.  Did you see my sermon?  It has evoked the worst feeling: I fear people don’t care for the truth, or else I don’t tell it.  Suffer me to wander without purpose.  I have sent off twenty letters to-day, and begun and stuck at a twenty-first, and taken a copy of one which was on business, and corrected several galleys of proof, and sorted about a bushel of old letters; so if any one has a right to be romantically stupid it is I—and I am.  Really deeply stupid, and at that stage when in old days I used to pour out words without any meaning whatever and with my mind taking no part in the performance.  I suspect that is now the case.  I am reading with extraordinary pleasure the life of Lord Lawrence: Lloyd and I have a mutiny novel—

(Next morning, after twelve other letters)—mutiny novel on hand—a tremendous work—so we are all at Indian books.  The idea of the novel is Lloyd’s: I call it a novel.  ’Tis a tragic romance, of the most tragic sort: I believe the end will be almost too much for human endurance—when the hero is thrown to the ground with one of his own (Sepoy) soldier’s knees upon his chest, and the cries begin in the Beebeeghar.  O truly, you know it is a howler!  The whole last part is—well the difficulty is that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I don’t know who is to write it.

I still keep wonderful.  I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle.  Dear sir, sincerely yours,

Andrew Jackson.