Black's curses on the editors who changed his manuscript will be echoed by all authors,—though sometimes the editor keeps the author out of a blunder or a scrape.
My dear Osgood,—
I don't think these sheets will be of any use to Messrs. Harpers. The "Snow Idyll" they are themselves publishing next month; and the two other stories have been published before. However, if they care to make a volume of them, well and good: only, I must not be paid anything for it.
The proofs you have are uncorrected and I can't get them put straight before the end of next week. But perhaps the ingenious devil in Franklin Square who is always altering my work will exercise a fatherly care over them. I notice this morning that in the House—Boat he has changed "Carry me back to Tennessee" into "Carry me back to old Virginny." Fancy an American not knowing the familiar banjo-song of "Elsie Fee, or carry me back to Tennessee!" And, damn him, if he didn't know it, why didn't he leave it alone! However, that is not so ludicrous as his exploit in changing, in Harpers' Bazaar, the motto of the Leucanian Republic, which I had quoted in "Sunrise" into modern school-girl Italian!!
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