I am going on to Aldrich’s funeral, and with a rather lone and heavy heart, since I began life here in New York with him before the Civil War, and had every expectation that he would survive me: not wholly on the score of my seniority, but because I have had my “three calls” and more, and because he has ever been so strong and young and debonair. Health, happiness, ease, travel, all “things _waregan_,” seemed his natural right. If I, too, wished for a portion of his felicities, I never envied one to whom they came by the very fitness of things. And I grieve the more for his death, because it seems to violate that fitness. Now, I can’t think of meeting you on Friday without first making this poor and inadequate attempt to set one thing right. Your latest letter—I _was_, at least, moved by it to address myself at once to a full reply, but was myself attacked that day so sorely by the grippe that I went to bed before completing it and was useless for weeks; the letter showed me that you thought, as well you might, that I had been hurt or vexed by something you had unwittingly done or written. I can say little to-night but to confess that no act, word, or writing, of yours from first to last has not seemed to contain all the friendship, kindness, recognition, that I could ever ask for.... Perhaps I have the ancestral infirmity of clinging to my fealties for good and all; but, as I say, you are my creditor in every way, and I constantly find myself in sympathy with your writings, beliefs, causes, judgments.—Now I recall it, the very choice you made of a little lyric of mine as the one at my “high-water” mark gave me a fine sense of your comprehension—it seemed to me a case of _rem acu tetigit_. I am thoroughly satisfied to have one man—and that man _you_—so quick to see just where I felt that I had been fortunate.... For some years, I venture to remind you, you have seen scarcely anything of mine in print. Since 1900 I have had three long and disabling illnesses, from two of which it was not thought I could recover. Between these, what desperate failure of efforts to “catch up.” Oh, I can’t tell you, the books, the letters, the debts, the broken contracts. Then the deaths of my wife and my son, and all the sorrows following; the break-up of my home, and the labor of winding up so much without aid. But from all the rack I have always kept, separated on my table, all your letters and remembrances—each one adding more, in my mind, to the explanation I had _not_ written you.... Your attached kinsman and friend, EDMUND C. STEDMAN.