MY DEAR BOY, I meant to have written you before this but I have been very much occupied and your mother has been wrestling with her house. She has gotten down to the kitchen with her cleaning. She has hired a woman who is to come next week and she wants to get the house in order for her. I have had company. On Friday afternoon "Teddy Roosevelt Jr" came and stayed until Monday morning. He is his father in miniature. He kept me on the stretch all the time. On Saturday we went up the Shataca and cooked our dinner on the little island where you and I did. We had a good time. He climbed trees and rocks like a squirrel. He was all the time looking for something difficult to do. May 19. I was choked off here and now I am in a pickle. We began to fix the cistern yesterday and got it half finished when the rain came--an inch and a half of water and your mother is furious--cried all night and is crying and storming yet this morning. Of course the blame is all mine. I wanted to fix it ten days ago but she said no, she wanted the water to clean house. If I and you had both died she could not have shed more tears than she has over this petty matter. I shall take to Slabsides to escape this tearful deluge. It has been very dry, no rain and no tears for six weeks. I was glad to see it come, cistern or no cistern. It has saved the hay crop and the strawberries. The leaves are all out here and the apple blossoms fallen. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson of N. Y. came Sunday and left Monday night. Clifton Johnson came Tuesday morning and left Wednesday. Some Vassar people were coming to-day but it rains from the N. E. Of course you can pick up no decent girl on the street and I should keep aloof from them. A decent girl would resent the advances of a stranger. The birds are very numerous this spring. Your loving father J. B. In the spring of '99 Father was asked to join the E. H. Harriman Alaska Expedition, and though very reluctant he consented to go--he was historian of the expedition and his account of it appeared in the _Century_ and in his book, "Far and Near." Mother had always said that "his folks" were afraid to go out of sight of the smoke of the home chimney. Something of this was in Father. He had to make himself go. He was always unhappy when leaving home and home ties. He made many new friends on this trip--John Muir, whom he liked immensely in spite of the fact that he sometimes called him a "cross-grained Scotchman"; Fuertes, the nature artist; Dallenbaugh, one of those who made the trip through the Grand Canyon with Major Powell and who wrote "A Canyon Voyage"; Charles Keeler, the poet, and many others. Near Fort Wrangell, Alaska June 5 {1899}. MY DEAR BOY,