Transcription:
I also promised a year a go to write two articles on Alaska for the same magazine .but I have a thousand things to think about
in caring for these two ranches have but little time for such work, while writing to me is very hard, for I have no facility
in composition no available vocabulary - only - only invention imagination. But why should you care to hear this. The weather
has been very hot for a week l05 illegible? to 110 illegible? my head swims until horticulture and literature are mixed into
rubbish only ice Alaska seem clear and significant. We are all living, or rather melting, together at the Strentzel home
now,while my sister Maggie and family Ed Coe his friend Arthur Coleman keep the old house. Ed is doing well growing every
way I hope he will stay with me forever -a terrestial forever. None of your Indiana birds have yet alighted here on their
western flight, but I still hope to see them. Surely they will not be so idiotic as to wait for a sealed and solemn invitation.
I must, however, send a note to Katey Graydon for she's so bashful. We are all well, some of us venerable, looking like old
trees or white mountain tops, etc. - I saw your friend Emily O. Pelton a week ago. She is very literary industrious and thin.
I had a letter from our good old friend Prof. Butler the other day written at Paris. He is evidently well, merry oddly speculative
as ever, racing round the globe for fun, money, wisdom exercise. Now I must quit this go to my dismal solemn composition.
Remember me to your mother Aunts Kate Mina to the fine man-boys Sue Ketcham warmly naturally as though I had been gone from
Indiana but a day (for?) I am always your friend, John Muir