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to. The beaver certainly must be an intelligent little animal with his engineering instinct. The trees standing out in the backwater are dead, but beyond, on the other side, are evergreens that stretch away into green nothingness..On the left, in the near distance, rises quite a mountain, with steep and rocky sides rather sparsely covered with pine and birch. And all of this is reflected in the water amid the black, shimmering shapes of the dead trees. It is a wilderness all right, with its own peculiar solitude. And yet its solitude does not appeal to me like the ocean's although it does attract me greatly. I cannot help but think that seven weeks from today you and I will be together where the ocean roars and casts its spell -- no spell like it in all this world. We arose at 4:30 this morning, spending the night in the Pottersville Hotel, and drove back into the mountains to a lonely farm, near which we built a fire and had breakfast consisting of bread, hot bacon and very hot coffee. We got water from a quaint old well which had a real "old oaken bucket" and iron bound too. Of course, we scorned any dipper and drank from the iron bound bucket. Last night was rather disappointing in that we built our fire in a sort of an oven beside the road and afterward took a short ride before we went back to Pottersville to turn in early in anticipation of arising at dawn. But this morning it was glorious and we all heartily agreed that it had it over Schenectady "like a tent." I thought of Browning's

"Day!
Faster and most fast
O'er night's brim day boils at last,
Boils pure gold on the cloud cup's brim,
Where spurting and suppressed it lay -- "

Next month, dawn over the ocean! How glorious it will be.

[[underlined]] To Mother "on a hillside in the Adirondacks beneath blue skies, May the 10th, 1925." [[/underlined]] : I do wish that you were here for you would love it so. I am sitting with my back to a fencepost and gazing off across a little valley to the mountains beyond. The valley is filled with evergreens where the creek runs, but beyond on the mountainsides everywhere is the yellow-green of new leaves and the white stems of the birch trees. The skies are blue with here and there a pearly cloud. The sun is high above my head, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing of the glory of the world -- oh, it's marvelous! ...... We cooked our dinner out last evening along the roadside and all agreed it had Pelops beaten every way although the bacon was a bit burned. We took a short drive after supper and then returned to Pottersville where we put up at the hotel for the night. At half past four (sunrise) we were called and put off into the mountains. Had breakfast near an isolated farmhouse where we left the car. No trout have fallen victims of our flies and