Letter, 1887, New York to James Whitcomb Riley

              N.Y.  Oct 21, 1887.

My Dear Jamesie:

	I am counting upon seeing you real hard on the 28 unless one of us should miss our train.  By the way is Washington in Pa. or D.C.?  Why can’t you ‘ I make the programme for the 28 also?  You will have the hides of the dear ones on your hands when I get there.  Would it not make a double song and dance if we were both to work the old business.  O Jamesie, God nose I hate to do the act alone.  Go with me to the end.  Go with me down to the dark valley and with me climb the barbed wire fence that encloses the lecture field.  The 28 is Friday and we can meet around one common altar on Saturday and converse in low, passionate tones of the dear, dead, and swelled up past.  Before I forget it, let me say that your last letter before this, containing a little poem which you calimed to have let in the presence of Catalpa or addressed to her, I uncautiously read to our genial and urbane managing editor who greedily snapped it  up for the Sunday World, but So far the Insane Asylum, & the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy have crowded out everything else but the advertisements.  I do not know that I did right in allowing him to take it did I?  But your name is a household word at the World office and if you were to come in here on a busy day, you would have to fight just as hard to get up the elevator an Col. Fred Grant or Tom Ochiltree.  If you hear me this winter, you will be charmed with the same programme to which I have so religiously adhered in the pus-infested Past.  So if you are