This letter was mailed to Susan Dickinson around 1883 (Smith and Hart) or 1884 (THJ, RWF). The pencil line beside the final lines of the embedded poem may have been drawn by Susan Dickinson to mark a passage that had special significance for her. Paste marks on the manuscript suggest that it may have been pasted into an album. For an earlier, incomplete fair-copy draft of the letter, see A 637 (October 1884 [THJ], about 1884 [RWF]); for a related fragment, see A 287 (October 1884 [THJ], about 1884 [RWF]). The fair-copy fragment may have been excerpted from a lost variant version of the poem beginning "Some Arrows | slay but whom | they strike."