To Miss Theodora Sedgwick

CHOCORUA, July 12, 1909.

Dear Theodora,—We got your letter a week ago, and were very glad to hear of your prosperous installation, and good impressions of the place. I am sorry that Harry couldn't go to see you the first Sunday, but hope, if he didn't go for yesterday, that he will do so yet. When your social circle gets established, and routine life set up, I am sure that you will like Newport very much. As for ourselves, the place is only just beginning to smooth out. The instruments of labor had well-nigh all disappeared, and had to come piecemeal, each forty-eight hours after being ordered, so we have been using the cow as a lawn-mower, silver knives to carve with, and finger-nails for technical purposes generally. There is no labor known to man in which Alice has not indulged, and I have sought safety among the mosquitoes in the woods rather than remain to shirk my responsibilities in full view of them. We have hired a little mare, fearless of automobiles, we get our mail dally, we had company to dinner yesterday, relatives of Alice, the children will be here by the middle of the week, the woods are deliciously fragrant, and the weather, so far, cool—in fact we are launched and the regular summer equilibrium will soon set in. The place is both pathetic and irresistible; I want to sell it, Alice wants to enlarge it—we shall end by doing neither, but discuss it to the end of our days.

I have just read Shaler's autobiography, and it has fairly haunted me with the overflowing impression of his myriad-minded character. Full of excesses as he was, due to his intense vivacity, impulsiveness, and imaginativeness, his centre of gravity was absolutely steady, and I knew no man whose sense of the larger relation of things was always so true and right. Of all the minds I have known, his leaves the largest impression, and I miss him more than I have missed anyone before. You ought to read the book, especially the autobiographic half. Good-bye, dear Theodora. Alice joins her love to mine, and I am, as ever, yours affectionately,

WM. JAMES.