He is going to send me some instruments, and I mean to go over all the glacier basins carefully, working until driven down by the snow. In winter I can make my drawings and maps and write out notes. So you see that for a year or two I will be very busy. I have settled with Hutchings and have no dealings with him now. I think that next spring I will have to guide a month or two for pocket money, although I do not like the work. I suppose I might live for one or two seasons without work. I have five hundred dollars here, and I have been sending home money to my sisters and brothers,--perhaps about twelve or fifteen hundred dollars,--and a man in Canada owes me three or four hundred dollars more, which I suppose I could get if I was in need, but you know that the Scotch do not like to spend their last dollar. Some of my friends are badgering me to write for some of the magazines, and I am almost tempted to try it, only I am afraid that this would distract my mind from my work more than the distasteful and depressing labor of the mill or of guiding. What do you think about it? Suppose I should give some of the journals my first thoughts about this glacier work as I go along and afterwards gather them and press them for the Boston wise; or will it be better to hold work and say it all at a breath? You see how practical I have become and how fully I have burdened you with my little affairs. Perhaps you will ask, “What plan are you going to pursue in your work?” Well, here it is,--the only book I ever have invented. First I will describe each glacier with its tributaries separately, then describe the rocks and hills and mountains _over_ which they have flowed or _past_ which they have flowed, endeavoring to prove that all of the various forms which those rocks now have are the necessary result of the ice action in connection with their structure and cleavage, etc. Also the different kinds of cañons and lake-basins and meadows which they have made. Then, armed with this data, I will come down to the Yosemite, where all my ice has come, and prove that each dome and brow and wall and every grace and spire and brother is the necessary result of the delicately balanced blows of well-directed and combined glaciers against the parent rocks which contained them, only thinly carved and moulded in some instances by the subsequent action of water, etc.