January 21st.<\/i>\u2013Both of us were too ill to attend Mrs. Davis’s reception. It proved a very sensational one. First, a fire in the house, then a robbery\u2013said to be an arranged plan of the usual bribed servants there and some escaped Yankee prisoners. To-day the Examiner is lost in wonder at the stupidity of the fire and arson contingent. If they had only waited a few hours until everybody was asleep; after a reception the household would be so tired and so sound asleep. Thanks to the editor’s kind counsel maybe the arson contingent will wait and do better next time.<\/p>\n
Letters from home carried Mr. Chesnut off to-day. Thackeray is dead. I stumbled upon Vanity Fair for myself, I had never heard of Thackeray before. I think it was in 1850. I know I had been ill at the New York Hotel,[1]<\/a> and when left alone, I slipped down-stairs and into a bookstore that I had noticed under the hotel, for something to read. They gave me the first half of Pendennis. I can recall now the very kind of paper it was printed on, and the illustrations, as they took effect upon me. And yet when I raved over it, and was wild for the other half, there were people who said it was slow; that Thackeray was evidently a coarse, dull, sneering writer; that he stripped human nature bare, and made it repulsive, etc.<\/p>\n
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