Room 355

 

Department of the Interior,

General Land Office,

Washington, D.C.,      Dec 22-1911

 

My Dear Comrade—

                                    For such you are as I see you were a Cavalryman and I was for two years a private in the Black Horse (Co H 4^th Va Cav)

 

I send my book as a Christmas greeting to one of those ragged Rebs—who is my friend whether I ever met him or not. In confidence I would have made Johny Reb and Billy Yank the great success of the times, had my plans been carried out for I was many years a travelling correspondent of N.Y. Herald, Forest & Stream, Alex^a Gazette, Norfolk Landmark & Virginian-Petersburg Index Appeal, & Dore Pealls Capital, but increasing deafness caused me to enter this Department and to withdraw from society and devote myself to literature, but the confidential part is that Neale published the book & by his vanity and stupidity knocked all my plans in the head / and I was so disgusted, I withdrew the work from publication after the first edition was sold.

 

Now about the women of Mosby's Confederacy—I have been five years collecting the data and it reads like romance, & it is the best literary work ever done. Had these women lived North instead of South they would have been immortalized in song and story. the [?] pen, the [?] chisel would been used to telling purpose. The ony war heroine the North produced was Barbara Freitche—which by the way as you know was a creation of a poets fancy.

 

A Southern artist will splendidly illustrate the work.

 

I have not yet put the scattered chapters together, but will as soon as the type sorter gives me the last one. Of the sketch of the King of the Debatable Land, as Mosby was often called during the war, I am most favorable impressed with your tentative proposition. Any man who could not trust that face must be a poor judge of human nature. Send me your book, so that I may lose myself, bring back my youth, when glorious radiant hope made me laugh at death

 

With the Compliments of the Season

Truly Yours, Alex^r Hunter

SOURCES