The Chicago Club,
[DEAR FAMILY: October 2,
1892.]
Though lost to sight I am still thinking of you sadly.
It seems that I took a coupe after leaving you and after
living in it for a few years I grew tired and got out on the
prairie and walked along drinking in the pure air from the
lakes and reading Liebig's and Cooper's advs. After a brisk
ten mile walk I reentered my coupe and we in time drew up
before a large hotel inhabited by a clerk and a regular
boarder. I am on the seventh floor without a bathroom or
electric button — I merely made remarks and then returned to
town in a railroad train which runs conveniently near. After
gaining civilization I made my way through several parades or
it may have been the same one to the reviewing stand. My
progress was marked by mocking remarks by the police who asked
of each other to get on to my coat and on several occasions I
was mistaken by a crowd of some thousand people for the P — —
e
of W — — s, and tumultuously cheered. At
last I found an inspector of police on horseback, who agreed
to get me to the stand if it took a leg. He accordingly
charged about 300 women and clubbed eight men — I counted
them — and finally got me in. He was very drunk but he was
very good to me.
DICK.
Once back from Chicago Richard divided his time between
his desk at Franklin Square, his rooms on Twenty-eighth
Street, and in quickly picking up the friendships and the
social activities his trip to England had temporarily broken
off. Much as he now loved London, he was still an
enthusiastic New Yorker, and the amount of work and play he
accomplished was quite extraordinary. Indeed it is difficult
to understand where he found the time to do so much. In
addition to his work on Harper's he wrote many short
stories
and special articles, not only because he loved the mere
writing of them, but because he had come to so greatly enjoy
the things he could buy with the money his labors now brought
him. His pleasures had increased as steadily as the prices he
could now command for his stories, and in looking back on
those days it is rather remarkable when one considers his age,
the temptations that surrounded him, and his extraordinary
capacity for enjoyment, that he never seems to have forgotten
the balance between work and play, and stuck to both with an
unswerving and unceasing enthusiasm. However, after four
months of New York, he decided it was high time for him to be
off again, and he arranged with the Harpers to spend the late
winter and the spring in collecting material for the two sets
of articles which afterward appeared in book form under the
titles of "The Rulers of the
Mediterranean" and "About Paris." He set sail for Gibraltar
the early part of February, 1893, and the following letters
describe his leisurely progress about the Mediterranean ports.
