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Sunday October 18th 1885. It has been a warm hazy day with a South wind. Calvert and I took a walk around the cemetery and out to the hill above the High bridge. It has not been a restful day to me and I was too full of warring thoughts to enjoy what beauty there was in the landscape. Sara is to go to Tivoli tomorrow and Calvert and I are not going to Shokan until the afternoon as he has some matters to attend to at the Terry House. We walked down there this afternoon meeting John McEntee on the way who went with us and we went over the house which is getting on towards completion. Frank Waters came there while we were there. He spoke of the taxes and the great expenses of their place (the Ludlums) and said he wishes they could sell it and go to a smaller place. The little he said showed me they are in something the same condition we are in, but I said nothing to show we were worried in the same way. I never went away from home so reluctantly to my sketching. The thought of leaving Sara here alone with my father is a great anxiety and I would not go did I not hope to awaken some interest in my art and to get myself to thinking of my work in which every thing seems to depend now. Calvert and I called at John McEntees this evening. I have finished Taylors story of Kennett and have been greatly interested. The story is well constructed and holds the attention and interest of the reader all the way through. Joe and Jake Fairthorn however to me are superfluous and not at all amusing, but on the whole it is an interesting story; and many features of it are masterly particularly his delineations of country ways and people and his descriptive passages. The scenes with Sandy Flash are thrilling and dramatic and if written by a stranger I should have pronounced it a successful story.

Thursday 29th I returned this forenoon from Shokan where Calvert and I went on the 19th.  We staid at C. H. Weidners an excellent place where we were most comfortable and I sketched along the brook near the house. The last time Whittridge and I were in Shokan in 1876 I think we sketched along the same stream where I had been some years before. Now all those picturesque places are utterly destroyed by successive fishnets and the whole repair is a tangled, desolated thicket. I could not have believed a place could so utterly have changed. Calvert was obliged to return to N.Y. last Sunday but he said he had never been in a place in the Kaatskills he liked better. Arthur Partin came there and spent a few days, he having been there before. I made eight or ten sketches, mostly bits in the woods and along the stream and had lovely weather most of the time. The Autumn color was past its height when we went and today when I left the leaves were pretty well blown off. It rained this morning and I came home although I had intended to stay until Saturday. I come home to great anxieties which indeed I could not quite keep down during my stay. Tom our man and Minnie our cook were married last Sunday and Sara has a new cook, a middle aged woman with a little girl and she has that responsibility with all her other cares. Sara has too much responsibility and it seems cowardly for me to feel cast down while she has so much to discourage her, but the look into the uncertain future with its certain demands and shadowy resources is some thing I cannot indulge in without the greatest apprehensions. My father seems as well as usual but he had a turn of great feebleness a week ago and alarmed Sara, but he seems to have recovered from it. The going away to New York and leaving Sara alone here is a great

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-05 15:54:42 "The Story of Kennett" is a book written by Bayard Taylor, published in 1866, and is mentioned in Jervis' diary entry for Oct. 18th, 1885 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-05 17:28:24