Transcription:
Jan. 1907 THE DAVENPORT DEMOCRAT AND LEADER DAILY, SUNDAY AND WEEKLY EIDITONS EDITORIAL ROOM DAVENPORT. IOWA My
Dear Mr. Muir;- Doubtless you are quite unaware of the pleasure that your New Year's remembrance, though only a postcard
picture of a Sequoia, brought to our home. Anything that comes laden with remembrance of California, the forests, the rocks,
the flowers, and the friends that are there, is more than welcome here, but you little memento was particularly gladdening,
for we had not done ourselves so proud as to suppose that you would in the least remember us, and when we found that you did,
and cared enough to send us the greetings of the season, you may be sure we made an event of it. We wondered if there might
not have been some telepathic suggestion to call us to you mind. At the time it came I was re-reading, again, your book, Our
National Parks, and enjoying it with that heightened and sharpened zest one always brings to scenes revisited. It is always
gratifying, I think to anyone, to find somebody who sees things as with his own eyes, and who understands things according
to his own interpretation, but it is doubly delightful to a clumsy bungler like myself to find somewhere a man who not only
sees and understands as I like to believe I do, but who can put into clear, luminous, enlightening words the things that I
can only feel, having not the power to clothe my feelings with such language. So, I say, it is doubtful if you know quite
the extent of the good you have done me, and my folk, either by the writing of these books, or by the mere remembering of
us at the beginning of another year. I note that the late literature of the Santa Fe road makes mention the new petrified
forests-I should say the old petrified forests newly discovered by you and your daughter, as you wrote to me last April. That
is all-it only makes 03809