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of what a marvelous world and day we are living in. There we stood all hooded, like men of another planet, looking at that terrific point of heat and light through black glass; the alternating current roared deafeningly as it sprang back and forth across that gap between the points of tungsten, white hot. In that intense heat, steel flowed like water, copper melted almost instantaneously, and from that tiny arc, only about a quarter inch in diameter, came such an intense light that the whole room was illuminated by a pinkish-white glare. And that awful source of such terrific light and heat was controlled by one finger hidden beneath the folds of an asbestos glove! A marvelous time to be here in the world, what?

[[underline]] To Willie, August 15, 1925: [[/underline]] Mother and I took a walk down along the river after supper. We saw the scarlet sun set down behind the distant hills just as we all watched it that night at Selkirk near Albany. How fast it sank from sight. And it also reminded us of the lovely Sunset Service at Shoals. As long as I live I shall remember that service that Dr. Soares conducted two years ago. After the sun had gone down, the sky turned a beautiful pale lavender, reflected in the water of the river. It really was lovely. While we were there a train thundered across the bridge, thrilling me greatly. All the windows showed the yellow lights inside the cars, and away she sped, faster and faster into the west after the sun. I think how many, many times you have ridden across that same bridge -- three times we have gone across together, and many, many more times that bridge will find us going across it together, on through the years that are ahead. Tomorrow, providing the weather is pleasant, I think that Mother and I shall get a boat and go up the river a bit. It looks so wonderfully inviting. I marvel that I have never before this availed myself of the opportunity to get out onto its waters in a boat. I love to float along a river in a boat. It is such a pleasure -- such solid contentment -- to lie back in a boat or canoe and float along wherever the current or breeze cares to take one.

[[underline]] To Willie, August 16, 1925: [[/underline]] I do wish too that we might make the time go by by merely a stroke of the pen like that. Time is funny. It is only relative like everything else. It all depends on conditions as to whether it passes rapidly or slowly. I know we made the same reflections after that meteoric ride to Utica last New Years, when we rode seventy-seven miles in seventy-seven [[underline]] seconds [[/underline]]. And some other poor unhappy soul on the same train probably felt that it took at least seventy-seven hours. I remember reading in an Einstein book this example of the relativity of time: That if some great power were to suddenly to slow down [[underline]] every [[/underline]] process of nature to 1/1000 say, of its original speed, so that each day took 24,000 hours, etc., we should beuunable to detect any change whatsoever because everything would still have the same [[underline]] relative [[/underline]] value in regard to time, and

Transcription Notes:
changed processor to process. "we should beuunable" near the end of the page should obviously be "we should be unable", but I left it as written--thomasc In "To Willie, August 15, 1925": Changed "shower" to "showed."--MSoul13