University of Virginia Library

A COMPLAINT ABOUT CORRESPONDENTS, DATED
IN SAN FRANCISCO.

WHAT do you take us for, on this side or
the continent? I am addressing myself
personally, and with asperity, to
every man, woman, and child east of the Rocky
Mountains. How do you suppose our minds
are constituted, that you will write us such execrable
letters—such poor, bald, uninteresting
trash? You complain that by the time a man
has been on the Pacific coast six months, he
seems to lose all concern about matters and
things and people in the distant East, and
ceases to answer the letters of his friends and
even his relatives. It is your own fault. You
need a lecture on the subject—a lecture which
ought to read about as follows:

There is only one brief, solitary law for letter-writing,
and yet you either do not know
that law, or else you are so stupid that you

never think of it. It is very easy and simple:
Write only about things and people your correspondent
takes a living interest in.

Can not you remember that law, hereafter,
and abide by it? If you are an old friend of
the person you are writing to, you know a
number of his acquaintances, and you can rest
satisfied that even the most trivial things you
can write about them will be read with avidity
out here on the edge of sunset.

Yet how do you write?—how do the most of
you write? Why, you drivel and drivel and
drivel along in your wooden-headed way about
people one never heard of before, and things
which one knows nothing at all about and
cares less. There is no sense in that. Let me
show up your style with a specimen or so.
Here is a paragraph from my Aunt Nancy's
last letter—received four years ago, and not
answered immediately—not at all, I may say:

I always stopped there, because I knew what
was coming—the war news, in minute and dry
detail—for I could never drive it into those
numskulls that the overland telegraph enabled
me to know here in San Francisco every day
all that transpired in the United States the day
before, and that the pony express brought me
exhaustive details of all matters pertaining to
the war at least two weeks before their letters
could possibly reach me. So I naturally skipped
their stale war reports, even at the cost of
also skipping the inevitable suggestions to read
this, that, and the other batch of chapters in
the Scriptures, with which they were interlarded
at intervals, like snares wherewith to trap
the unwary sinner.

Now what was the Rev. Macklin to me? Of
what consequence was it to me that he was “an
humble laborer in the vineyard,” and “took his
coffee strong”?—and was “unassuming,” and
“neuralgic,” and “prayerful”? Such a strange

conglomeration of virtues could only excite my
admiration—nothing more. It could awake no
living interest. That there are few such men,
and that we had soup for dinner, is simply
gratifying—that is all. “Read twenty-two
chapters of II. Kings” is a nice shell to fall in
the camp of a man who is not studying for the
ministry. The intelligence that “poor Mrs.
Gabrick” was dead, aroused no enthusiasm—
mostly because of the circumstance that I had
never heard of her before, I presume. But I
was glad she had fits—although a stranger.

Don't you begin to understand, now? Don't
you see that there is not a sentence in that letter
of any interest in the world to me? I had
the war news in advance of it; I could get a
much better sermon at church when I needed
it; I didn't care any thing about poor Gabrick,
not knowing deceased; nor yet the Rev. Macklin,
not knowing him either. I said to myself,
“Here's not a word about Mary Anne Smith—
I wish there was; nor about Georgiana Brown,
or Zeb Leavenworth, or Sam Bowen, or Strother
Wiley—or about any body else I care
a straw for.” And so, as this letter was just
of a pattern with all that went before it, it was

not answered, and one useless correspondence
ceased.

My venerable mother is a tolerably good correspondent—she
is above the average, at any
rate. She puts on her spectacles and takes her
scissors and wades into a pile of newspapers,
and slashes out column after column—editorials,
hotel arrivals, poetry, telegraph news, advertisements,
novelettes, old jokes, recipes for
making pies, cures for “biles”—any thing that
comes handy; it don't matter to her; she is
entirely impartial; she slashes out a column,
and runs her eye down it over her spectacles—
(she looks over them because she can't see
through them, but she prefers them to her more
serviceable ones because they have got gold
rims to them)—runs her eye down the column,
and says, “Well, it's from a St. Louis paper,
any way,” and jams it into the envelope along
with her letter. She writes about every body I
ever knew or ever heard of; but unhappily, she
forgets that when she tells me that “J. B. is
dead,” and that “W. L. is going to marry T.
D.” and that “B. K. and R. M. and L. P. J.
have all gone to New-Orleans to live,” it is
more than likely that years of absence may

have so dulled my recollection of once familiar
names, that their unexplained initials will be
as unintelligible as Hebrew unto me. She
never writes a name in full, and so I never
know whom she is talking about. Therefore I
have to guess—and this was how it came that
I mourned the death of Bill Kribben when I
should have rejoiced over the dissolution of
Ben Kenfuron. I failed to cipher the initials
out correctly.

The most useful and interesting letters we get
here from home are from children seven or
eight years old. This is petrified truth. Happily
they have got nothing to talk about but
home, and neighbors, and family—things their
betters think unworthy of transmission thousands
of miles. They write simply and naturally,
and without straining for effect. They
tell all they know, and then stop. They seldom
deal in abstractions or moral homilies.
Consequently their epistles are brief; but,
treating as they do of familiar scenes and persons,
always entertaining. Now, therefore, if
you would learn the art of letter-writing, let a
little child teach you. I have preserved a letter
from a small girl eight years of age—preserved

it as a curiosity, because it was the only
letter I ever got from the States that had any
information in it. It runs thus:

This child treads on my toes, in every

other sentence, with a perfect looseness, but in
the simplicity of her time of life she doesn't
know it.

I consider that a model letter—an eminently
readable and entertaining letter, and, as I said
before, it contains more matter of interest and
more real information than any letter I ever
received from the East. I had rather hear
about the cats at home and their truly remarkable
names, than listen to a lot of stuff about
people I am not acquainted with, or read “The
Evil Effects of the Intoxicating Bowl,” illustrated
on the back with a picture of a ragged
scalliwag pelting away right and left, in the
midst of his family circle, with a junk bottle.