Transcription:
2 THE DAVENPORT DEMOCRAT AND LEADER DAILY, SUNDAY AND WEEKLY EIDITONS EDITORIAL ROOM DAVENPORT. IOWA Mention; it
gives no details and no description. How I should like to sit down somewhere out of doors, where the birds and squirrels and
tame, and listen to your account of what you found there, and have you came upon it; And how much better I should like to
wander among those agate logs, with you leading the way It must have been almost enough to make you forget the sorrow you
had left behind you at your home, to roam, a discoverer, through a region of such forest growth as that. To a man who loves
and knows the forest giants and the forest children of today as you do, by making their acquaintance in their own homes, this
ramble through the trees of forgotten ages must have brought strange sensations. I have been watching for the story of this
chapter of discover, and I hope we shall have it soon. We left California, last spring, five days before the earthquake.
Our boy, then it Stanford, advised us that we had been there as long as was good for him; he had several hard examinations
in prospect, and we were a bar to anything like serious study. So we came away the morning of Friday, April 13. The superstitious
person will surely have hard work to reason from this combination of unlucky days that we invited disaster upon ourselves.
It was the fellow who did not leave on that day, or some other more or less auspicious, who got into trouble. But, good luck
or bad, it was hard to leave. The Gold of Ophir was minted in unlimited coinage all over the trellises and trees and fences
and houses all the way from San Diego to Sacramento, and every living thing out of doors was showing us its most inviting
side, and pleading with us to stay. We had hope to fix ourselves there during the winter, but it so happened that we did not,
and the necessity of taking care of what we had back here in Iowa forced us to leave the Coast and come. But ever since we
have been trying to so shpae 03809