This fragment, now an extrageneric text ending in medias res, appears to have been excerpted from a longer composition, possibly a fair-copy letter-draft, since destroyed or lost. The author of the tears has not been positively identified; they may be the work of a censor or of Dickinson herself. Millicent Todd Bingham associated the manuscript with Dickinson's correspondence with Judge Otis P. Lord; no complete fair-copy of the manuscript has survived, however, and Dickinson's final intentions toward the fragment remain unknown.