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1007 West Oregon 
Urbana, Illinois
August 8, 1956

Dear folks, 

I don't know how Dolores could have gotten the idea that we were coming to Washington on July 1 or August 1, but I will drop her a line correcting whatever misstatement was made in my last letter to her. Actually, of course, we are coming on the weekend of August 31. 

We now are down to one crawfish. Sadly we saw the next-to-last l[[strikethrough]]o[[/strikethrough]]ose his feet, feelers, and finally his life. The remaining one, called the "Monster" is perfectly intact; apparently he has eaten most of the others, or at least not been eaten by anyone else in any [[strikethrough]] pat of [[/strikethrough]] part of him. He had one strange property , that of not changing his shell as often as the others; while they were soft they usually suffered the major disability. He just changed his shell yesterday for the first time in weeks, and has just finished eating it today. We hope to raise him to a large size. We have taken several boat trips on the pond in which we found our crawfish; we have seen about two living crawfish there out of the thousands of tiny ones which swarmed the shoreline. So I guess our crawfish didn't lose out. However, from the size of most crawfish which died (saw shells) we assume our "Monster" should be bigger now; we will have to feed him better!

This coming week end we shall go to Chicago. My final is on Friday morning. We plan to see the Davises, our old Washington friends, and will probably go swimming. Incidently, we went swimming the last time we were in Chicago. I was surprised to find that the water was not as cold as off Boston beaches, but even bearable--but of course not like the Chesapeake Bay bathtub. 

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REVIEWER DID NOT SEE TRANSCRIBER'S MISTAKE USING [strike] instead of [[strikethrough]]. Reopened to fix this.