Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story. But about the not hurrying it — I want to tell you something — You know I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it. knew I had no background — no local color for it.

Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel that I had — that the scene laid there--& the old Mexican life mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had happened to them — would be the very perfection of coloring. You know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.

Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot flashed into my mindnot a vague one--the whole story just as it stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke it. I sprang up, went to my husband's room, and told him: I was half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me, becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it. I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot help being superstitious about it. I have never done