if you can "do anything" about my play? I thought I must have
told you of my offering it to Macready, who civilly declined having
anything to do with it. Circumstances induced me to destroy my own copy
of it: the one Macready had is in Harriet's custody, another copy I have
given to Elizabeth Sedgwick, and I now neither know nor care anything
more about it. Once upon a time I wrote it, and that is quite enough to
have had to do with it. Prescott, the historian of Ferdinand and
Isabella, is urgent with me to let him have it published in Boston;
perhaps hereafter, if I should want a penny, and be able to turn an
honest one by so doing, I may.

It is odd that I have not the remotest recollection of reading any of
that play to you. You have mentioned it several times to me, and I have
never been able to recall to my mind, either when I read it to you, or
what portion of it I inflicted upon you. You were lucky, and I wonder
that I let you off with a _portion_ of it; for, for nearly a year after
I finished it, I was in such ecstasies with my own performance, that I
martyrized every soul that had a grain of regard for me, with its
perusal....

J---- B---- and his brother have just started for Georgia, leaving his
wife and myself in forlorn widowhood, which, (the providence of
railroads and steamboats allowing) is not to last more than three
months. I have been staying nearly three months in their house in town,
expecting every day to depart for the plantation; but we have
procrastinated to such good effect that the Chesapeake Bay is now
unnavigable, being choked up with ice, and the other route involving
seventy miles of night traveling _on the worst road in the United
States_ (think what that means!), it has been judged expedient that the
children and myself should remain behind. I am about, therefore, to
return with them to the Farm, where I shall pass the remainder of the
winter,--how, think you? Why, reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which
I have never read yet, and which I now intend to study with classical
atlas, Bayle's dictionary, the Encyclopaedia, and all sorts of "aids to
beginners." How quiet I shall be! I think perhaps I may die some day,
without so much as being aware of it; and if so, beg to record myself in
good season, before that imperceptible event,

Yours very truly,
F. A. B.