Part 8 (2/2)

Nov 30, 1899

MY DEAR JULIAN,

I a ready for dinner

Hud and his wife and yourover soon We are to have a roast duck and other things and I shall do the roasting and baking here

I wish you were here too It is a cloudy day, but still andon my Alaska trip--have already written about ten thousand words The _Century_ paid ot for ”Paradise Lost” The third poem I shall weave into the prose sketch The N Y _World_ sent a et me to write six or seven hundred words for their Sunday edition They wantedturkey! Offered me 50--they wanted it in two days Of course I could not do it off-hand in that way So I fished out of my drawer an old MS, that I had rejected and sent that They used it and sent me 30 It was in the Sunday _World_ of Nov 19

I have sold four lots here for 225 One house will be started this fall Wallhead and Millard of P If I don't look out I will ins to look ht the rock beyond the spring for 75

Van and Allie are ditching and cleaning the swaraphy is not an art in the sense that painting or music or sculpture is an art It is nearer theis an art that does not involve the iination and the artistic perceptions

All the essentials of photography are ment and the experience of the raph can never be really a work of art You can put those stateis burned up in Hyde Park early last night Robert Gill shot hilad to see you again

Your loving father,

J B

A long line of ducks just flew over going north

The last letter from Slabsides was on May 23, 1900:

MY DEAR BOY,

I am here surrounded by the peace and sweetness of Slabsides I ca in the rain It is a soft, hazy h a thin layer of seaood, and the birds are singing and calling all about I have got to go to N Y this afternoon to a dinner I hadI begin to feel that I could get to writing again if I was left alone I want to write a _Youth's Co rabbits and young blue birds Teddy {Footnote: The son of President Roosevelt} and I found

Did you row in the races? What race are you preparing for now? It is bad business The doctors tell e When they stop it, as they do after their college days, they have fatty degeneration In anything we force nature at our peril

When you are in Boston go into Houghton Mifflin Co and tell thee tofather,

J B

When I graduated at Harvard of course Father was there and he went to the baseball gas--we had a little reception in s In the yard one day one of the old classes ca them was the new Vice-President, Theodore Roosevelt, and everyone cheered ”Yes,” said Father, as we stood there that bright June day, ”Teddy takes the crowd”--how little did he know the future, or guess that so with Roosevelt”! Jacob Reid has said that no one who really knew Roosevelt ever called him Teddy, and I knoas so in Father's case On his trip to the Yellowstone with the President, Father wrote:

In South Dakota, April 6, 7 P M

DEAR JULIAN,

We are now speeding northward over Dakota prairies On every hand the level brown prairie stretches away to the horizon The groups of fars are from one half to a mile apart and look as lonely as shi+ps at sea Spots and streaks of snow here and there, fallen this reen thing; far wheat; straw stacks far and near; miles of corn stubble, now and then a lone school house; the roads a black line fading away in the distance, the little villages shabby and ugly When the train stops for water a crowd of men, women, and children make a rush for the President's car He either speaks to theets off and shakes hands with thehts no one He is a true democrat He makes about a dozen speeches per day, uest I am kept near him At the banquets I sit at his table; on the platforms I sit but a few feet away, in the drives I a back he sends for hts comes to my room to see how I have stood the day In St Paul and Minneapolis there were fifty thousand people on the sidewalks As we drove slowly along through the solid walls of huirls with irls pushed through the crowd and hurriedly handedbouquet of flowers The President saw it and was s like that have happened, so you can see your dad is honored in strange lands--more than he is at ho, and a few ducks and one flock of geese It is near sundo and I see only a level sea of brown grass with a building here and there on the rim of the horizon We are well fed and I have to look out or I eat too much You can see that the world is round up here Your affectionate father,