I invoke you as I would a breath of your invigorating Yorkshire, for I am captive in a land of idleness—myself idlest of all the easy, time-squandering folk that are making believe to finish my house here upon the sunburnt hilltop. This lodge in the wilderness, uplifted like an island above encompassing seas of green; this wind-swept, sun-steeped place, ought, perhaps (in spite of latitude and longitude), to give me back without your aid the picture and the feeling of the North. For the first word I set at the top of my page, though Indian, would not have been understanded of my ancient neighbors here. Not the Seminoles, the Alaskans gave us our name. I and another for whom it means home, pronounced it first to the rhythm of breakers beating on that wild Bering coast—in the midst of the pandemonium of the “farthest North” gold boom, we dreamed and planned the picture I look out upon this morning. It might not seem beautiful to you, yet, in spite of your wise warning, there have gone into my effort to make the dream come true the most precious things I had. Into this Chinsegut, as you know, went, amongst the rest, a great faith. So that, however reminiscent of people or conditions long since passed away, however much of the spirit of the past is garnered here as living influence, or as debris and as ashes, these were for me infinitesimal affairs by comparison with the hope for the Future that made me turn deaf ears to your admonishing. For this was to be a place where my fellow-dreamer and I should not only rest, but having rested, work as never before. Our best and biggest room was to be called the Workroom. But some strange spell has hitherto hung over that apartment and all the house, since even the white remodelers of the slave-built dwelling have found it easier to play than work here. As if foreseeing that the added wing, new stable, and the rest, would take more months a-building than they would need weeks in other climes, our “workmen,” uneasy perhaps under the misnomer, organized themselves into a Musical Society. They would lay a brick or rap in a nail, and then, casting aside trowel or hammer, would catch up fiddle and bow, horn, or clarinet, trying (since walls had been known to fall at trumpet blast) whether these could be induced to rise to strains of “Dixie.” One of the band to whom I owe my not very sound roof, was at least a person of imagination, as I will make your ladyship admit, if the distractions here will give me leave to try. These are not solely the growling of saws, the scraping of planes and of fiddles. I find myself forever running to and fro like a child in some enchanted playground, wooed by fifty things at once—but not one of them has aught to do with books or with any aspect of the art of letters.