Letter from James Whitcomb Riley to Howard S. Taylor

Greenfield, Ind. April 24, '83 Dear Taylor: Your illustrated postal was a great delight to me - although it rather unjustly accused me of neglect in not writing to you. But if it seemed neglect to you, a hundred other duties suffered the same treatment, and as unavoidably:- I have been racing to keep up with the procession, and for a year have been too out-o-breath to even pant a letter to my now only brother in the world - so you see I have some claim not only on your forgiveness but your sympathy as well. How I want to see you, and how I want to talk and talk with you! On a flying visit to Greencastle some weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of meeting with your Mother for the

first time - a wonderful woman I thought her. She told me you were expected out this way again in a short time - but you never came - or - if you did - slipped like a gleam of vigilant evasiveness past me, as you did the visit to Terre Haute and Crawfordsville before. Later I saw your brother John, who said he'd tell me when you came, but I have heard no word from him since then. The closing lecture season has been good to me all through - far better than any season I have yet experienced. I had two months of it in New England states, and seemed to capture every audience. I have many new things written, but few committed. This summer I must devote largely to that very difficult and disagreeable duty. Will have for next season's business one bran-splinter new lecture entitled "Eli and How He Got There." It will have stuff in it you would like I am sure, and I'd like to fire it at you. I have a regular engagement with Soife, a new humorous illustrated publication at New York which pays me handsomely, and promises to broaden and advance my literary prospects - in that line, of course. Outside of contributions there in verse I have a prose series running, under title "Judkins' Boy", which will continue indefinately - having taken so well. I am first informed by Editor that a Boston artist will illustrate the continued numbers - sending me an illustrated letter from him over which I have laughed till I cried. And now God bless you! I think of you all the time, and must see you soon, your good wife and the children. Give all my heartiest regards

and warmest wishes, and read aloud to them the very latest jingles the tardy-coming summer has wrung from the weeping pen of Young as ever, J.W. Riley