My love to Allie and Henry Butler and all my friends, please tell the Butlers when we are coming. Their invitation is prior to yours, but your houses are not widely separated. I mean to write again before leaving home. You will then have all my news and I will have only to listen. Most cordially, JOHN MUIR. Indianapolis, August 30th, 1867. We are safely in Indianapolis. I am not going to write a letter, I only want to thank you and the Doctor and all of the boys for the enjoyments of the pleasant botanical week we spent with you. We saw, as the steam hurried us on, that the grand harvest of _Compositæ_ would be no failure this year. It is rapidly receiving its purple and gold in generous measure from the precious light of these days. I could not but notice how well appearances in the vicinity of Chicago agreed with Lesquereux’s theory of the formation of prairies. We spent about five hours in Chicago. I did not find many flowers in her tumultuous streets; only a few grassy plants of wheat and two or three species of weeds,--amaranth, purslane, carpet-weed, etc.,--the weeds, I suppose, for man to walk upon, the wheat to feed him. I saw some new algæ, but no mosses. I expected to see some of the latter on wet walls and in seams in the pavement, but I suppose that the manufacturers’ smoke and the terrible noise is too great for the hardiest of them. I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be “carried of the spirit into the wilderness,” I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest. Is not your experience the same as this? I feel myself deeply indebted to you all for your great and varied kindness,--not any the less if from stupidity and sleepiness I forgot on leaving to express it. Farewell. J. MUIR. Among the Hills of Bear Creek, seven miles southeast of Burkesville, Kentucky, September 9th, [1867.] I left Indianapolis last Monday and have reached this point by a long, weary, roundabout walk. I walked from Louisville a distance of 170 miles, and my feet are sore, but I am paid for all my toil a thousand times over. The sun has been among the treetops for more than an hour, and the dew is nearly all taken back, and the shade in these hill basins is creeping away into the unbroken strongholds of the grand old forests. I have enjoyed the trees and scenery of Kentucky exceedingly. How shall I ever tell of the miles and miles of beauty that have been flowing into me in such measure? These lofty curving ranks of bobbing, swelling hills, these concealed valleys of fathomless verdure, and these lordly trees with the nursing sunlight glancing in their leaves upon the outlines of the magnificent masses of shade embosomed among their wide branches,--these are cut into my memory to go with me forever.