e only safe position
to occupy.

Again; there are two apparently irreconcilable contrasts here. Down
below in this hotel every night are the bar loungers, dram drinkers,
drunkards, swaggerers, loafers, that one might find in a Boucicault
play. Within half an hour is Cambridge, where a delightful domestic
life--simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate--is seen in an
admirable aspect. All New England is primitive and puritanical. All
about and around it is a puddle of mixed human mud, with no such quality
in it. Perhaps I may in time sift out some tolerably intelligible whole,
but I certainly have not done so yet. It is a good sign, may be, that it
all seems immensely more difficult to understand than it was when I was
here before.

Felton left two daughters. I have only seen the eldest, a very sensible,
frank, pleasant girl of eight-and-twenty, perhaps, rather like him in
the face. A striking-looking daughter of Hawthorn's (who is also dead)
came into my room last night. The day has slipped on to three o'clock,
and I must get up "Dombey" for to-night. Hence this sudden break off.
Best love to Mamie, and to Katie and Charley Collins.

[Sidenote: Mr. W. Wilkie Collins.]

WESTMINSTER HOTEL, NEW YORK, _Sunday, Jan. 12th, 1868._

MY DEAR WILKIE,

First, of the play.[21] I am truly delighted to learn that it made so
great a success, and I hope I may yet see it on the Adelphi boards. You
have had a world of trouble and work with it, but I hope will be repaid
in some degree by the pleasure of a triumph. Even for the alteration at
the end of the fourth act (of which you tell me in your letter received
yesterday), I was fully prepared, for I COULD NOT see the original
effect in the reading of the play, and COULD NOT make it go. I agree
with Webster in thinking it best that Obenreizer should die on the
stage; but no doubt that point is disposed of. In reading the play
before the representation, I felt that it was too long, and that there
was a good deal of unnecessary explanation. Those points are, no doubt,
disposed of too by this time.

We shall do nothing with it on this side. Pirates are producing their
own wretched versions in all directions, thus (as Wills would say)
anticipating and glutting "the market." I registered one play as the
property of Ticknor and Fields, American citizens. But, besides that the
law on the point is extremely doubtful, the manager of the Museum
Theatre, Boston, in