A 761: etext transcription

This text, now a freestanding extrageneric fragment, appears to have been excerpted from a longer composition: three stray marks along the scissored bottom edge of the manuscript are evidence that text is missing from the end of the fragment as well as from its beginning. The author of the cuts has not been 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 letter to Lord, however, has survived, and Dickinson's final intentions toward the fragment remain unknown.